ROBESPIERRE.

that, "except a single trace of physical suffering, one perceived with emotion the most noble calm and the sweetest smile upon that face, which seemed enwrapped in a living sleep, and occupied with an agreeable dream."

Marat and Robespierre are among the most enigmatical productions of a very enigmatical movement. During their lives they were not very beautiful in conduct, or very amiable in character; but the casts taken of their faces after their uncomfortable deaths are quiet and peaceful, and the effect they produce is one of loving rather than loathing. In the mask of each the cerebral development is small, especially in the region of the frontal bone; and phrenological experts who have examined them say that their development, or lack of development, taken with their facial traits, indicates ill-balanced minds.

Marat's face, as David painted him, is that of a North American Indian with a white skin. The contemporary portraits of Robespierre, on the other hand, represent a mild-mannered man of severe and pensive expression. According to Lamartine his forehead was good, but small and projecting over the temples, as if enlarged

by the mass and embarrassed movements of his thoughts. His eyes, much veiled by their lids, and very sharp at the extremities, were deeply buried in the cavities of their orbits; they were of a soft blue-color. His nose, straight and small, was very wide at the nostrils, which were high and too expanded. His mouth was large, his lips thin and disagreeably contracted at each corner, his chin small and pointed. His complexion was yellow and livid. The habitual expression of his face was the superficial serenity of a grave mind, and a smile wavering betwixt sarcasm and sweetness. There was softness, but of a sinister character. The dominant characteristic of his countenance was the prodigious and continued tension of brow, eyes, mouth, and all the facial muscles.

The masks of Mirabeau, Marat, and Robespierre are known to have been taken, in each case, after death, "by order of the National Assembly." Those of Marat and Robespierre in my collection are identical with the wax effigies in the "Chamber of Horrors" in Madam Tussaud's gallery in London, her catalogue asserting that they are "authentic."

The contemporaries of Sir Isaac Newton, like those of Kean, were all so much

SIR ISAAC NEWTON.

impressed by what he knew and by what he did, that they seldom thought of posterity as caring to know how he looked, either in life or in death. From many different sources, however, we learn, in a fragmentary way, that he was "short but well-set, and inclined to be corpulent"; that "he had a very lively and piercing eye"; that his hair was abundant and white as silver, without any baldness, and when his peruke was off was a venerable sight"; that he was a man of no very prominent aspect"; that "his face was almost square, and that his chin had unusual width"; that "although he reached the great age of eighty-four, he retained until the last almost all of his teeth"; and that "his countenance was mild, pleasant, and comely." Bishop Atterbury said," in the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any very great expectation in those who did not know him"; and Dr. Humphrey Newton, who was his assistant and amanuensis, said that during the many years of their intimate association he never knew him to laugh but once!

His death was not without pain, and his mask will not be recognized readily by those who are only familiar with his face as pictured and sculptured with his peruke on.

The terra-cotta bust of Newton, from the hands of Roubilliac himself, is in the British Museum. His bust and fulllength statue in marble, by the same artist, belong to Trinity College, Cambridge. They were both, as is well known, based upon this mask of his face, taken after death, the original of which, made by Roubilliac, is now in the rooms of the Royal Society, at Burlington House in London. It was presented to that institution in 1829 by the then secretary of the society, Mr. Samuel Hunter Christie, and the officers of the society have no doubt of its authenticity. Mr. Christie found it by accident in the shop of a dealer in statuary, whose father had purchased it at the sale of Roubilliac's effects more than half a century before. dealer parted with it for a few shillings, although he was satisfied that it was the mask of Newton, and by Roubilliac. Charles Richard Weld, in his History of the Royal Society, gives a steel engrav

The

lectual as in a physical way. Ben Caunt, the pugilist, died in London in 1861, universally respected. He was, during the later years of his life, proprietor of the Coach and Horses, a public-house in St. Martin's Lane, much frequented by his old pupils, and by all of the prominent patrons of the prize-ring. He came to America in the early forties, giving a series of exhibitions throughout the country, but never engaging in any serious encounter here. He was a leader in his own profession, and at one time, perhaps, the best-known man in all England. His portrait, which once adorned the walls of cottage and palace, is still to be found in Mile's Pugilistica, taken at the period of his famous fight with "Bendigo" in 1842. His head is certainly a strong one, and in a phrenological way he was better than many of the men among his contemporaries who did better things.

AST month the Easy Chair advised

it was necessary to raise umbrel

ting convention; but after the experience of this year at Minneapolis and Chicago, it seems to be probable that the convention will undergo fundamental changes. Seven cities contend for its presence, not for the sentiment of pride and reverence that stimulated the rival urban claims to have given birth to Homer, but for the purpose of turning a penny more or less honest. Not only is the great throng supposed to spend profusely at hotels and small shops, but a building is erected with accommodations for thousands of spectators, each one of whom pays extravagantly for his pleasure, and the receipts are appropriated by a body of enterprising citizens.

This scheme, however, is not likely to be attempted again after the late experience at Chicago. A huge, formless, ugly, and discreditable structure was devised called a wigwam, which was to be erected with a canvas roof; but a few days before the convention assembled a violent storm swept over the city, tore off the canvas, and, it was feared, wrenched the timbers so as to breed a certain natural sense of insecurity. It was doubtful whether the building could be made ready, and to allay apprehension it was necessary to publish a certificate that it would be safe. The throngs that poured into Chicago may be called hordes, and with incessant music so called, and shouts, and endless marching processions, a convention city does not suggest paradise.

The multitude occupied the wigwam at the appointed hour. The convention itself, comprising something less than a thousand delegates, filling a central space, around which and above which were galleries designed to hold twenty thousand people, a mass which no chairman's gavel or voice and no marshals or sergeants-atarms could control; a well-drilled army or a regiment of armed police alone would be able to cope with the multitude. Just as the work began, a tremendous thunderstorm burst over the building. The roof was partly open, and there was a pitiful struggle to bring the canvas into play as a protection. But no resource was adequate. The building became so dark that there were fears of a panic; but electric lights were lit, and under the drip of the rain

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 508.-63

ning and terrific peals of thunder, the deliberations began. Probably a more uncomfortable, apprehensive, and dismal crowd never proceeded to the work of such an occasion.

This condition was repeated every day. It was a week of heat and storms, and it was impossible to prevent the leakage. On the last night, when the angry excite ment culminated, one of the electric lights fell, to the utmost consternation of the delegates. Fortunately no injury was done, but it was a fitting climax to the continuous disasters and annoyances of the session, which were at once more amusing and more exasperating because in no convention for many a year was there probably more angry bitterness of feeling.

But these untoward incidents might have occurred at any great convention. The distinction of this Chicago assembly was that it exhibited on the greatest scale a mischievous tendency, whose possibilities were perceived at the first of the great conventions - the convention of 1860-which met in a wigwam in Chicago and nominated Abraham Lincoln.

That convention was seated upon a stage, and the rest of the building was occupied by the multitude of spectators. It was, fortunately, an orderly as well as enthusiastic crowd, although it was said, even then, that the wigwam was intended to hold an Illinois crowd of ten thousand to compel the nomination of Lincoln. This year in Chicago the overpowering throngs in the galleries of the wigwam had their own way. They howled down the speaker whom they did not choose to hear. They insulted distinguished delegates. They shouted and stormed, and defied parliamentary authority and the police. Eminent orators denounced the mob, and the mob laughed and jeered.

The president of the convention, who was a scholarly man, as he sat powerless in the midst of the wild uproar, doubtless recalled the French convention of '93, when the sans-culottes thundered and shrieked their will from the galleries, and governed France by anarchical madness. The miserable folly of nominating the chief officer of the republic in such a

senseless pandemonium was evident to more than one delegate, who did not see the people in a raging mob. The people are the industrious citizens, busy at their work all over the land, not the idlers and worse of a great city. The orator who denounced the crowd as a mob of ruffians spoke for the people, and so especially did Mr. Collins, of Boston, who introduced a resolution providing that hereafter provision shall be made to accommodate the convention and the press, but not the assembly of a mob to dominate the proceedings.

Hereafter when a city appeals to the National Committee of a party for the National Convention, and promises a building that will hold ten or twenty thousand people, its claim, for that reason, should be rejected peremptorily.

THE part of the English-speaking race that inhabits the British Islands is apt to show among its more ignorant classes much more brutishness than is shown by the American branch of the race. Seventy and eighty years ago, when the American Englishman foolishly permitted himself to be very much disturbed by the gibes of the British traveller, who, seeing our sensitiveness, took especial pleasure in pricking and prodding us with his pen, which, after all, was more blunt than pointedin those belligerent years our literary forefathers angrily retorted with the tu quoque; and there are pamphlets of the time which are mainly catalogues of incidents of brutality and outrage culled from the British newspapers.

"These dreadful people," said the Briton, "spit a great deal, and eat pease with a knife, and sit in their shirt sleeves at the theatre, and ask a great many questions, and speak the language somewhat differently from us. Pigs run at large in the streets of the city of New York, and in general it is a vain, vulgar, and boastful people." In the whole chorus of writers who exasperated us by such comments, there was no one of ability, no one who was worthy of attention, hardly one who could be called clever. But the effect upon our sensitiveness was undeniable, and none of them was visited with more wrath than a certain commonplace clergyman named Fidler, who might have been a curate in one of Miss Austen's novels, and whose dulness was so dense as to be entertaining.

The rejoinder, however, was always crushing. If Americans eat pease with a knife, Englishmen kicked their wives and sold them in open market, and every offence against social conventions on our part was set off by an offence against common humanity on the part of John Bull. The catalogue was long and painful, and it left the same impression of brutality among the lower English class that is derived from English novels of the last century, and from hints in Hogarth's pictures, and which is constantly confirmed by current reports. The latest of such stories is that of the missile thrown at Mr. Gladstone, and the riot at the speech of Mr. Stanley.

Our elections are excited, and there is sometimes a quarrel at the polls. But there is no breaking up the meetings of one party by the attacks of the other. Just after the adoption of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in the open air in New York, and stones were thrown at him; and in the hot campaigns that preceded the civil war there were sometimes violent interruptions of political meetings. But the custom of our campaigns is wholly different. Each side respects the meetings of the other, and a personal indignity from a Democratic opponent to Mr. Edmunds's speaking upon the stump would be resented upon all sides as warmly as a Republican assault upon Mr. Bayard.

Such a scene as that at Lambeth in London, where Mr. Stanley and his wife were driven from the platform by an angry mob, which sought to tear them from their carriage, and from which they escaped only with great difficulty, is wholly unknown in this part of the Englishspeaking world. Yet it seems to be very familiar in the British Islands. It springs from the same spirit that makes prizefighting a national institution, and which made Taine feel that upon a certain kind of Englishman the veneer of civilization is very thin.

The tu quoque argument is not thought to be often very effective except to stir up wrath. To answer a charge of eating pease with a knife with the retort that it is better than kicking your wife, hardly advances the controversy toward a settlement. This, however, is natural, because the root of the controversy is that you are Dr. Fell. The Fidler kind of Englishman disliked our fathers because they