fully. "Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive; his hair, of a brown color, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. His head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull, a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on."

Mr. William Sharp quotes a letter of Joseph Severn, written a day or two after the death of Keats, in which he said to Charles Armitage Brown, "Yesterday a gentleman came to cast the face, hand, and foot" of Keats. And on the 3d of April, 1821, John Taylor wrote to Severn from London for "the mask, hand, and foot." The later history of these interesting casts I have never been able to learn.

The original cast of the life-mask of Keats, made in Haydon's studio, and very much finer than any of the replicas of it, is in the possession of the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was given by Keats himself to his intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, just before Keats went abroad to die. Reynolds bequeathed it to his sister, Miss Charlotte Reynolds, by whom it was presented, with a clear pedigree, to the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery.

This cast, the mask of Cromwell described in a later article, and

a copy of the mask of Dr. Johnson are, curiously enough, the only life-masks, or death-masks, in the institution in question. The original of the mask of Johnson belongs to the Royal Literary Fund, the secretary of which, Mr. A. Llewelyn Roberts, in giving his consent to the reproduction of it here, writes as follows concerning it: "It was taken from a cast after death, under the direction of Dr. Johnson's medical attendant, Mr. Cruikshanks, who informed his daughter, into whose possession it came, that it was a remarkably correct likeness. Unfortunately there is no record of the artist's name, but it is alleged that each member of Dr. Johnson's family had a copy." This particular copy was given to the Royal Literary Fund by William Hutchins,

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Esq., who lived in Hanover Square. There is no reference to the taking of the mask of Johnson to be found in any of the editions of Boswell's Life of the great lexicographer.

Keats and Haydon first met in the house of Leigh Hunt in November, 1816, and to their mutual delight. They be

JOHN KEATS.

came very intimate upon very short acquaintance, and the poet was constantly to be found in the studio of the painter; they vowed, mutually, that they were dearer to each other than brothers, and they prayed, jointly, that their hearts might be buried together. Naturally a friendship so enthusiastic in its beginning did not last very long; and Haydon seems to have been most unjust in his reflections upon Keats, written some time after Keats's heart had been buried in Rome-and alone! Haydon wrote in the first flush of his intimacy with Keats: "Never have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his arm-pits and ether in his soul; while I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me-they came over me,

and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God."

This is Haydon upon himself. Macaulay looked at him in a different light. "Haydon". he wrote in his Diary in 1853--"Haydon was exactly the vulgar idea of a man of genius. He had all of the morbid peculiarities which are supposed by fools to belong to intellectual superiority-eccentricity, jealousy, caprice, indefinite disdain for other men; and yet he was as poor, commonplace a creature as any in the world. He painted signs, and gave himself more airs than if he had painted the Cartoons. Whether you struck him or stroked him, starved him or fed him, he snapped at your hand in just the same way!"

In the Memoir of Haydon by his son is a fine engraving of the death - mask of Haydon, a replica of which is in my collection. This mask, with that of Jeremy Bentham, was broken, as you here see it, by careless custom-house officers on its arrival in New York a few years ago, while the mask of Elihu Burritt was demolished entirely, and without hope of restoration. For these, notwithstanding their condition, I paid a duty of fifty-five per cent. upon a valuation assessed at twenty-five per cent. above what I swore was their value in London, the customhouse charges of various kinds being larger than the original cost of the casts themselves. So far as I can understand, I was taxed in this matter in order to protect the ghosts of the plasterers of America, who could not have made these casts even if they had so wished!

66

James Parton quoted Burr as saying of Jeremy Bentham, "It is impossible to conceive a physiognomy more strongly marked with ingenuousness and philanthropy." John Stuart Mill said of him that he was a boy till the last." And at the age of eighty-two he himself wrote to an old friend: "I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in good health and spirits; codifying like a dragon." "Candor in the countenance, mildness in the looks, serenity upon the brow, calmness in the language, coolness in the movements, imperturbability united with the keenest feeling:" such, according to Brissot de Warville, were the characteristics of Bentham.

Since St. Denis of France used to walk about with his head under his arm, or used to sit about with his head in his lap,

in the third century of our Christian era, no post-mortem performance is more grotesque than that of Jeremy Bentham, who left his body by will to Dr. Southwood Smith. The legatee was instructed to dissect it, and to deliver lectures upon it to his medical students and to the public generally. After these anatomical demonstrations a skeleton was to be made, and was made, of the bones. And Dr. Smith "endeavored to preserve the head untouched"- the words are his own-" merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an air-pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as hard as the skulls of the New Zealanders, but all expression, of course, was gone. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a mould made in wax by a distinguished French artist, taken from David's bust, Pickersgill's picture, and my own ring. The artist succeeded in producing one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen. I then had the skeleton stuffed out to fit Bentham's own clothes, and this was likewise fitted to the trunk. The figure was placed seated on the chair in which he usually sat, one hand holding the walking-stick which was his constant companion when he went out, called by him 'Dapple.' The whole was enclosed in a mahogany

JEREMY BENTHAM.

BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON.

case with glass doors." Bentham was wont to amuse himself in his boyish old age with the vision of his presiding, as it were, in proper person at meetings of his disciples, and he even used to anticipate his being wheeled to the top of the table on festive occasions!

His figure as here described is still to be seen in the rooms of University College, Gower Street, London. It is curious that Dr. Smith did not go to the mask for a representation of Bentham's actual face. That such a mask was made, George Combe testified in the columns of the London Phrenological Journal a few years after Bentham's death. He said that it was in his own possession, and showed that "the knowing organ was large and the reflective organs only full." The mask, he said, was very like the portrait of Bentham reproduced in Tait's edition of Bentham's works. But he does not say whether it was a death-mask or the life-mask known to have been made by Turnerelli, an Italian sculptor living in London, in the early part of this century, and when Bentham was not more than fifty years of age. He was eighty-five when he died. This plaster mask of Bentham has been compared carefully with the wax effigy in University College. The mouth, the

ANTONIO CANOVA.

cranial arch, the entire upper part of the face, and the general shape of the head are very like, although in the wax mask the chin is shorter and rounder, and the eyes, of course, are open.

It is rather a curious fact that the men most interested, naturally, in the study of the human face, and in its portrayal with chisel or pencil, are the men who are most poorly represented in this collection, Haydon and Canova being the only makers of masks whose masks are here presented.

Canova must have been a beautiful character. It is not often that so much good is spoken, even of the dead, as has been spoken of him since he died; and if the chroniclers are right, he deserved it all. In personal appearance, however, we read that he was not particularly attractive. His hair was black and luxuriant, and his forehead of noble dimensions, but the outline of his features was neither grand nor extraordinary. phrenologists gave him a massive brain upward and forward of the ears, wonderful constructive talent, with large ideality

The

and strong intellect.

He was very abstemious in his habits, very thoughtful, and a hard worker. Count Cicognara, in a biographical sketch of Canova, thus described his face during his very last hours: "His visage became, and remained for some time, highly radiant and expressive, as if his mind was absorbed in some sublime conception, creating powerful and unusual emotion in all around him. Thus he must have looked when imagining that venerable figure of the pontiff who is represented in the attitude of prayer in the Vatican. His death was wholly unattended by the agonies which make a death-bed so distressing, nor did even a sigh or convulsion announce his dying moment." This is the visage which his friends cast in plaster, as here reproduced. Its peaceful and quiet repose is in strong contrast with that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shown upon the opposite page.

In the whole history of English letters there can be found no sadder chapter than that which contains the story of Sheridan's death. The body out of which the breath was fast going, and from which intelligent action had entirely gone, was seized by sheriff's officers for debt, and only by the threats of attending physicians did it escape being carried to a low sponging-house, wrapped in nothing but the blankets that covered the bed on which it lay. The "life and succor" his friends had begged were denied him, and "Westminster Abbey and a funeral" were all he received. As a French journal said at the time, it only proved that "France is the place for a man of letters to live in, and England the place for him to die in." Sheridan's appearance during his last hours was thus depicted by one who saw for himself the havoc made: "His countenance was distorted under the writhings of unutterable anguish. Pain and the effects of pain were visible on that sunken cheek; and on that brow which had never knitted under oppression or frowned upon the importunities of the unfortunate, pain in its most acute form had contracted there its harsh and forbidding lines. . . . Still, amid those rigid lines which continuous suffering had indented there, you might perceive the softer and more harmonious tracings of uncomplaining patience, fortitude in its endurance, and resignation in its calmness." This is the face exhibited here - one of the most unpleasant to

look upon which the collection contains, notwithstanding Sheridan's own boast, not very long before his death, that "his eyes would look up as brightly at his coffin lid as ever." His spirits did not fail him so long as consciousness remained, and when asked by the attending surgeons if he had ever before undergone an operation, he replied, "Only when sitting for my portrait or having my hair cut." It is to be regretted that this last portrait for which he sat should be so worn and weary in its expression. Moore, in his Life of Sheridan, did not mention the taking of the mask, although he spoke of the plaster cast of Sheridan's hand, under which some keen observer had written, "Good at a fight, better at a play, Godlike in giving-but the devil to pay."

Concerning Moore's own appearance, Hunt wrote: "Moore's forehead was bony and full of character, with 'bumps' of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. His eyes were as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine leaves; his mouth generous, and good-humored with dimples." Scott said in his Journal, in 1825, "Moore's countenance is plain, but the expression is very animated, especially in speaking or singing, so that it is far more

interesting than the finest features could have rendered it." In 1833, Gerald Griffin made a visit to Moore at Sloperton, and thus described Moore himself: "A little man, but full of spirits, with eyes, hands, feet, and frame forever in motion. ... I am no great observer of proportions, but he seemed to me to be a neat-made little fellow, tidily buttoned up, young as fifteen at heart, though with hair that reminded me of Alps in the sunset'; not handsome, perhaps, but something in the whole cut of him that pleased me."

A year later, N. P. Willis, who was a great observer of proportions, met Moore at Lady Blessington's, and thus recorded his observations: "His forehead is wrin

kled, with the exception of a most prominent development of the organ of gayety, which, singularly enough, shines with the lustre and smooth polish of a pearl, and is surrounded by a semicircle of lines drawn close about it like intrenchments against Time. His eyes still sparkle like

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.

a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings about the corners.... His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight, and changeable as an aspen; but there is a set look about the lower lip-a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can almost see wit astride upon it. .... The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of the expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, radiates."

This was Moore as others saw him when he was in his prime. His later years were clouded by a loss of memory, and a helplessness almost childish. The light of his intellect grew dim by degrees,