before."

Equally sound, for once, is Kit's appeal against Sampson Brass: "Look at him, gentlemen. See how he changes colour. Which of us looks the guilty person-he, or I?" On the other side is to be noted Miss Edgeworth's Monsieur Pasgrave when, trembling from head to foot, though innocent, he exhibited all the signs of guilt-"the pale, conscientious, incapacitated dancing-master," to whom the magistrate imputed guilt in default of colour; though it is also to be observed that when the real culprit is charged, upon his face too are seen "all the pallid marks of guilt."* Richardson's Clarissa is moved by a painful experience to pen the reflection that very many may, like herself, by blushing at an injurious charge, have been suspected, by those who cannot distinguish between the confusion which guilt will be attended with, and the noble consciousness that overspreads the face of a fine spirit, to be thought but capable of an imputed evil. One of Miss Broughton's high-coloured and high-colouring heroines and yet it is not the one in Red as a Rose-would give ten years of her life for an unmoved complexion, when there is anything to move her, but it is of no use: struggle as she will against it, she feels that rush, that torrent of vivid scarlet, which, retiring, leaves her as white as her gown. "Oh! it is hard, that the lying changeableness of a deceitful skin should have power to work me such hurt." Her wan look sets her companion on proposing a glass of water. No, she thanks him, she is not at all faint. "But, alas! my words cannot undo what my false cheeks, with their meaningless red and their causeless white, have already done." In another chapter we read of her judiciously placing herself with her back to the light, so that if the exasperating flood of crimson bathe her face—and already she feels it creeping hotly up—

* Another student of human nature, commenting on the practised criminal's mastery of emotion as betrayed in words, tones, and even looks, denies that he can so rule the heart that the blood will not sometimes, and of a sudden, fly back to it in alarm; that subtle thing, whatever it is, that at times will send the warm stream of life rushing through every vein to the face, at others will cast it abruptly back to the deep well of the heart, -will do this, defiant of control.

it may be as little perceptible as possible. And in a later one still: "With a complexion that serves one such ill turns as mine does, one is not over-fond of facing people." Lord Lytton observes that in very young and sensitive persons, a great and sudden shock or revulsion of feeling reveals itself in the almost preternatural alteration of the countenance; not a mere paleness-a skin-deep loss of colour; but rather it is as if the whole bloom of youth had rushed away; the muscles fall as in mortal illness, and a havoc, as of years, seems wrought in a moment. Schiller's Joan of Arc, in the fourth act, is so stricken, and stricken dumb withal. "Horror and astonishment impede her utterance"-and in vain is she urged to confront her accuser and repel the charge: "Collect thyself, Johanna! innocence hath a triumphant look, whose lightning flash Strikes slander to the earth." But she can neither look up, nor speak, nor move. It is with her as with Hippolyte in Racine when so accablé by hideous charges "qu'ils m'ôtent la parole, et m'étouffent la voix." The author of Leah imagines that most innocent men or women would look to the full as guilty as really criminal ones in the first stunned moment of an unjust accusation; "guilty or innocent, the majority of human cheeks would certainly blanch—the majority of human nerves falter at such a moment." When Aurora Floyd first learnt the horrible charge that rumour preferred against her, she rose suddenly from her low seat, and turned her face to the light, with a look of such blank amazement, such utter wonder and bewilderment, that had her companion hitherto believed her guilty, he must thenceforth and for ever have been firmly convinced of her innocence. Caleb Williams appeals to the magistrate: "Mr. Forester,-you are a man of penetration look at me; do you see any of the marks of guilt?" On the other hand, Roderick Random's friend, Mr. Jackson, is so much abashed at certain remarks from the bench that he "changed colours, and remained speechless "--which confusion his worship accepted at once as a symptom of guilt. Rousseau had ample ground for arguing "combien sont trompeurs les jugements fondés sur l'apparence, auxquels le vulgaire

donne tant de poids, et combien souvent l'audace et la fierté sont du côté du coupable, la honte et l'embarras du côté de l'innocent." As an essayist on social subjects has remarked, the proud bearing of conscious innocence can hardly be sustained by ordinary men under the eyes of a suspecting and condemning multitude-so strange a power have the majority of thinking of themselves as others think of them. Much nonsense, it is allowed, has been written about the boldness of innocence. Unless gifted, as a late writer urged, with excellent nerves and muscles, unless favoured with favourable opportunity, and unless confronted with no very overwhelming adversary, Innocence is possibly the greatest coward living.

§ IV.

DENTAL DEMONSTRATION.

Love's Labour's Lost, Act v., Sc. 2.

BIRON has no mercy on Boyet. He cuts him up with the trenchant gusto of a professional carver. Conscious of his power of sarcasm, he delights to exercise it on so inviting a subject. Boyet, as satirized by Biron, is a mincing courtier, who pecks up wit, as pigeons peas, and retails it pedlar-fashion. wherever it is in demand; he can carve too, and lisp; he has kissed away his hand in courtesy; he is "the ape of form, monsieur the nice;" playing at tables he chides the dice in honourable terms; he sings tenor, after a sort; and as for ushering, why, as gentleman-usher, mend him who can. The ladies call him sweet,

"And consciences, that will not die in debt, Pay him the due of honey-tongued Boyet." The portraiture at large reads like one of the characters of Overbury done into rhyme. But there is one detail of aspect and character that Overbury would scarcely have missed, and that we have only reserved to the last; and that is, Boyet's

addictedness to dental demonstration,-if indeed ostentation be not a better word for it:

"This is the flower that smiles on every one,

To show his teeth as white as whalès' bone."

Saunderson, the blind Professor of Mathematics, is said, once in company, to have rightly guessed that a lady present had beautiful teeth; else, he remarked, she would not laugh so often. Says the Colonel to Miss, when she laughs, in Swift's Polite Conversation, "What, miss! you can't laugh but you must show your teeth." What refinement, and what limitations, the teeth betray! exclaims Mr. Emerson, in an essay on the Conduct of Life. "Beware you don't laugh," said the wise mother, "for then you show all your faults." Dr. Holmes somewhere observes that people who have one showy point are apt to betray their favouritism,—especially dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last molars. Victor Hugo's Paquette,-poor girl, what beautiful teeth she had, and how she would laugh that she might show them! "But a girl that laughs a great deal is in the way to cry; fine teeth spoil fine eyes”—and so La Chantefleurie found it. The Lady Mason of Mr. Trollope's painting had a mouth that was very regular, and her teeth were perfectly beautiful, but her lips were straight and thin: it would sometimes seem that she was all teeth, and yet it is certain that she never made an effort to show them. His Miss Van Siever, in a later work, had teeth that were "perfect too perfect-looking like miniature walls of carved ivory. She knew the fault of this perfection, and showed her teeth as little as she could." The D'Artagnan of Dumas greets Colbert with a laugh which disclosed to the minister thirty-two magnificent teeth, all of them seemingly ready to devour, though the adventurous Gascon is not to be thought of in connexion with Hood's picture of

"a horrible mouth, of such extent,

From flapping ear to ear it went,

And show'd such tusks whenever it smiled

The very mouth to devour a child."

Mr. Carker's set better answers that description. Molière

might have had him in view prospective, or foresight, when he penned the lines, suggestively feline,—

"belles dents, et des propos fort doux,

Mais, comme je vous dis, la griffe est là-dessous."

The impersonation of puss is as patent here as in Mr. Dombey's manager. In one of Washington Irving's letters there is a description of the once popular prima donna Parodi, which endows her with "a countenance very expressive, in spite of her teeth, which are a little of the 'Carker' order." Our earliest introduction to Mr. Carker is to a gentleman "with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth," the regularity and whiteness of which were quite distressing it was impossible to escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke, the width of his wide smile rarely extending, however, beyond the mouth. Chapter after chapter renews our familiarity with, and strengthens our distrust of, that false mouth, ever on the stretch, but never laughing. We see the man "expanding his mouth, as if it were made of India-rubber." We see him "grinning like a shark." We see him "bending his brows, without showing his teeth any the less." And we see casual gazers standing "amazed at the beauty of his teeth, and at his brilliant smile; and as he rode away, the people took him for a dentist, such was the dazzling show he made." There is in one of Mr. Gilbert's stories a solicitor whose teeth were strongly against the chance of his being an honest man, for they were "beautifully white and regular," and he was fond of showing them. What connexion there exists between the whiteness of the teeth and the cunningness of the heart one of his reviewers could not pretend to say; but that there is a connexion the critic unhesitatingly affirms after a long course of novel-reading-be the case one of "correlated variation," or whatever else it may.

There is that James Conyers, for instance, who would not have gone three paces out of his way to serve his best friend, but who smiled and showed his handsome white teeth with equal liberality to all his acquaintance, and took credit for being a frank, generous-hearted fellow on the strength of that smile. We might apply to him in this respect what is told