as he saw himself. And in the case of the death-mask particularly, it shows the subject often as he permitted no one but himself to see himself. He does not pose; he does not "try to look pleasant." In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off!

Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that "the dead, and the impressions of the dead, taken in plaster, are not less worthy of observation [than the living faces]. The settled features are much more prominent than in the living and in the sleeping. What life makes fugitive, death arrests. What was undefinable is defined. All is reduced to its proper level; each trait is in its true proportion, unless excruciating disease or accident have preceded death." And Mr. W. W. Story, in writing of the life - mask of Washington, says of life-masks generally: "Indeed a mask from the living face, though it repeats exactly the true forms of the original, lacks the spirit and expression of the real person. But this is not always the case. The more mobile and variable the face, the more the mask loses; the more set and determined the character and expression, the more perfectly the work reproduces it.”

The operation of taking a cast of the living face is not pleasant to the subject. In order to prevent the adhesion of the plaster, a strong lather of soap and water, or more frequently a small quantity of oil, is applied to the hair and the beard. This will explain the flat and unnatural appearance of the familiar mustache and imperial in the cast of the Third Napoleon. In some cases, as in those of Keats and the Queen of Prussia, a napkin is placed over the hair. The face is then moistened with sweet-oil; quills are inserted into the nostrils in order that the victim may breathe during the performance, or else openings are left in the plaster for that purpose. A description of the taking of the cast of a Mr. A-, condensed from a copy of the Phrenological Journal, published in Edinburgh in January, 1845, will give the uninitiated some idea of the process: "The person was made to recline on his back at an angle of about thirty-five degrees, and upon a seat ingeniously adopted for the purpose. The hair and the face being anointed with a little pure scented oil, the plaster was laid carefully upon the nose, mouth, eyes, and forehead, in such a way as to avoid

disturbing the features; and this being set, the back of the head was pressed into a flat dish containing plaster, where it continued to recline, as on a pillow. The plaster was then applied to the parts of the head still uncovered, and soon afterwards the mould was hard enough to be removed in three pieces, one of which, covering the occiput, was bounded anteriorly by a vertical section immediately behind the ears, and the other two, which covered the rest of the head, were divided from each other by pulling up a strong silken thread previously so disposed upon the face on one side of the nose." The account closes with the statement that "Mr. A— declared that he had been as comfortable as possible all the time"!

The process of casting from the mould similar to that of any other casting, and need not be described here.

is

The story of the beginning of my collection is rather a curious one. The half-dozen masks upon which it is based were found early in the sixties in a dustbin in one of the old-fashioned streets which run toward the East River, in the neighborhood of Tompkins Square, New York. Their owner had lately died; his unsympathetic and unappreciative heirs. had thrown away what they considered "the horrible things"; a small boy had found them, and offered them for sale to a dealer in phrenological casts, who realized their worth, although, in many cases, he did not know whose heads they represented; and so, by chance, they came into my possession, and inspired the search for more-a search extended over many years, and in the museums, the plaster shops, the curiosity shops, the studios, of most of the capitals of Europe and America. The history of the masks which formed the nucleus of the collection, or the history of the original collector himself, I have never been able to discover. They are, however, the casts most frequently described in the printed lectures of George Combe, who came to this country in the winter of 1838-9, and the inference is that they were left here by him in the hands of one of his disciples, with the result as above described.

The earliest masks in the collection are those of Dante, made, perhaps, in the first part of the fourteenth century, and of Tasso, certainly made at the end of the sixteenth. The latest mask is that of Lawrence Barrett, taken only a few

months ago. They range from Sir Isaac Newton, the wisest of men, to Sambo, the lowest type of American negro; from Ben Caunt, the prize-fighter, to Thomas Chalmers, the Light of the Scottish Pulpit; from Oliver Cromwell to Thomas Paine; from Keats to Robert Burns; from the First Napoleon to Robert the Bruce.

The Dante mask is generally believed to be authentic, although Mr. Charles Eliot Norton says that there is no trustworthy historic testimony concerning it. On the very threshold of his inquiry into the matter he was met with the doubt whether the art of taking casts was practised at the time of Dante's death at all, Vasari, in his life of Andrea del Verrocchio, who flourished in the middle of the fifteenth century, having declared that the art first came into use in Verrocchio's day. It is certain that there is no record of the Dante mask for three hundred years after Dante died; but it is equally certain that it resembles nearly all of the portraits of Dante down to the time of Raphael. Mr. Norton believes from external evidence that it is, at all events, a death-mask of some one. There are three or four casts in Florence which claim to have been made from the original mould of the Dante mask. The one here reproduced, although it came from Florence, does not pretend to be anything but a cast from a cast.

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Why keep you your eyes closed, Signor Torquato?" said a watcher at the death-bed of Tasso-one of those silly persons who ask silly questions, even under the most serious circumstances -"Why keep you your eyes closed?" "That they may grow accustomed to remain closed," was the feeble reply. They have been closed to all mortal visions for three hundred years now, but in the pale cold plaster of the accompanying mask they are still seen as they were seen by the vast and sorrowing multitudes who lined the streets of Rome to look upon his triumphant funeral procession. body was clad in an antique toga, kindled tapers lighted his way, and his pallid

brow was at last encircled by the wreath of laurel he had waited for so long. And thus at the end of the nineteenth century do we, in the New World, look upon the cast of the actual face of the great poet of the Old World who died at the end of the century he adorned. The original mask is preserved, with other personal relics of Tasso, in the room of the Convent of St. Onofrio, where he died and is buried.

The personal appearance of Tasso has been carefully and minutely described by

TASSO.

His

his friend and biographer Manso. broad forehead was high, and inclined to baldness; his thin hair was of a lighter color than that of his countrymen generally; his eyes were large, dark blue, and set wide apart; his eyebrows were black and arched; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was wide; his lips were thin; and his beard was thick and of a reddishbrown tinge.

Tasso went to Rome from Naples to receive from the hands of the Pope the crown of bay which had been worn by

SHAKESPEARE-STRATFORD BUST.

Petrarch and other laureates of Italy, and he died upon the day set apart for his coronation, April 25, 1595.

The head of Shakespeare here presented, from the monumental bust in the chancel of the church at Stratford, like everything else relating to Shakespeare, in life or in death, is shrouded in mystery. It is supposed to be the work of one Gerard Johnson, and to have been "cut from a death-mask" shortly after Shakespeare's funeral. The earliest allusion to it is to be found in a poem of Leonard Digges, written seven years later. It was certainly in existence during the lifetime of Mrs. Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, and of other members of his family, who would, perhaps, have objected or protested if the likeness had not been considered a good one. Sir Francis Chantrey believed it to have been worked from a cast of the living or the dead face. "There are in the original in the church," he wrote, "marks of individuality which are not to be observed in the usual casts from it; for instance, the markings about the eyes, the wrinkles on the forehead, and the undercutting from the moustach

ios." Wordsworth, among others, accepted its authenticity, and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps did not hesitate to put himself on record more than once as having every faith in its superiority, in the matter of actual resemblance, to any of the alleged portraits. He ranked it, in point of authority, before the Droeshout print, endorsed by Ben Jonson as perfect; and he called attention to the general resemblance to be traced between them.

It certainly differs in many respects from the famous plaster cast found in a curiosity shop in Germany some years ago, and known as the Kesselstadt mask, a photograph of which is here reproduced. This mask is believed, by those who believe in it, to have been made from Shakespeare's dead face, to have been carried to Germany by a member of the German embassy to England in the reign of the first James, to have been cherished as an authentic and valuable relic for many generations, to have been sold for rubbish

at the death of the last of the race, and to have been recovered in a most fortuitous way. It bears upon its back the date of Shakespeare's death, 1616; it has been the subject of more discussion than any piece of plaster of its size in the world;

and even those who believe that it is not Shakespeare have never asserted that it is Bacon!

According to Mr. G. Huntley Gordon, this cast from the Stratford bust was taken about 1845, stealthily and in the middle of the night, by a young Stratford plasterer, who was frightened by imaginary noises before he succeeded in getting a mould of the entire head. After the protest raised against Malone for whitewashing the bust in 1793, the vestry, naturally, had put an embargo upon any handling of the monument, and the operation was fraught with much risk to the aspiring youth who undertook it. A cast is known to have been taken for Malone, however, and since then other casts have been made by other artists, notably one by George Bullock, who made the deathmask of Scott.

Next to the Stratford bust, the sculptured portrait of Shakespeare most familiar to the world is that which stands in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. The artist went to some strange source for the likeness, and although it was for gentle Shakespeare cut, by no means does it outdo the life. "I saw old Samuel Johnson," said Cumberland, describing Garrick's funeral-"I saw old Samuel Johnson standing at the foot of Shakespeare's monument, and bathed in tears." Burke on that occasion remarked that the statue of Shakespeare looked towards Garrick's grave; and on this stray hint, as Mr. Brander Matthews believes, Sheridan hung his famous couplet in the Monody:

"While Shakespeare's image, from its hallowed base,

Served to prescribe the grave and point the place."

Garrick's face, it is said, was wonderfully under control, and his features had a marvellous flexibility, which rendered variety and rapid change of expression an easy matter. The story of his having frightened Hogarth by standing before him as the ghost of Fielding, assuming the appearance of the dead novelist in all of the fixedness and rigidity of death, has been often told. There are a great many original portraits of Garrick in existence. The Garrick Club in London possesses at least a dozen, while The Players in New York own two by Zoffany and one by Reynolds.

A not uncommon print, entitled "The

Mask of Garrick taken from the Face after Death," is in the Shakespearian Library at Stratford-upon-Avon, and it is to be found in Evans's "Catalogue of Engraved Portraits." It does not seem, however, to be the portrait of a dead man, being full of living expression, and it is, perhaps, an enlarged reproduction of the face in the miniature by Pine of Bath, now in the Garrick Club, the eye having the same dilation of pupil which was characteristic of the great actor.

The mask here shown was purchased in 1876 from the late Mr. Marshall, the antiquarian dealer in Stratford, who possessed what he believed to be its pedigree written in pencil on the back of the plaster, and now unfortunately defaced. He asserted that it was taken from life, and had come by direct descent from the sculptor's hands into his. There is a replica of it in the Shakespeare Museum at Stratford, but no history is attached to it, and the trustees know nothing of it, except that it was "the gift of the late Miss Wheeler." It resembles very strongly the familiar portrait of Garrick by Hogarth, the original of which hangs in one of the bedrooms of Windsor Castle.

In the Guild Hall" of "The City of Lushington," an ancient and very unique

EDMUND KEAN.

social club, which has met for many years in a dark and dingy little back room connected with the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, are still preserved the chair of Edmund Kean, the hole in the wall made by the quart pot he threw once, in a fit of gross insubordination, at a former "Lord Mayor," and what is religiously considered by all of the citizens of Lushington to be a deathmask of Kean himself. This cast is covered with glass and with dust, its history is lost in the mists of time, there is no record of it in the metropolitan archives, the corporation will not permit it to be reproduced, even by photography, and it bears but little resemblance to Kean, or to the mask in my possession,

which also has no history, which I believe to be authentic, and which is certainly very like the sketch of Kean done in oils by George Clint, and now in the possession of Mr. Henry Irving. This hurried sketch is said to be the only portrait for which Kean could ever be induced to sit. It was made in Kean's bedroom in a few hours, and it is the groundwork of more than one finished portrait of the same subject by the same artist. The portrait of Kean by Neagle, now the property of the Players Club, has a similar tradition.

The eye-witnesses of Kean's theatrical performances were generally so much impressed by the force of his acting that they paid little attention to his personal appearance. We read in Leslie's Autobiography that "he had an amazing power of expression in his face," and "that his face, although not handsome, was picturesque; a writer in the New Monthly Magazine in 1833 spoke of him as "a small man with an Italian face and fatal eye"; a writer in Blackwood, a few years later, called him "a man of low and meagre figure, of a Jewish physiognomy, and a stifled and husky voice"; while Miss Fanny Kemble said that "he possessed particular physical qualifications; an eye like an orb of light; a voice exquisitely touching and melodious in its

tendencies, but in the harsh dissonance of vehement passion terribly true." Barry Cornwall, in his poor Life of Kean, spoke of his thin, dark face, full of meaning, taking, at every turn, a sinister or vigilant expression," and as being "just adapted to the ascetic and revengeful Shylock." Henry Crabb Robinson said, in 1814, Kean's face

is finely

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expres