Beauty and Ugliness
People's notions of beauty differ. Tamerlane's wife who had no nose, was thought a belle by her cotemporaries. A Patrician of Venice had scurvy little proboseis, and that was held of itself a sufficient disqualification for the Dog's cap and ring. Cicero admired the squinting eye and such as Greek sculptors often gave to Venus, and Minerva was sometimes figured with a complexion as dusky as any gipsy wide on Epson Downs. Some the Greeks held blue eyes to be hideous, and Dlosclorides tells us that they had an art - the same practiced, perhaps, centuries afterwards, at Donnybrook fair - of making the black. Hunchbacks have had their admirers, who contend that dorsal curvature is the true lone of beauty, and that the hump, so far from being a deformity, ' as dull fools suppose,' is I itself a graceful ornament, seeing that , in its outline, it approximates the figure so many objects in nature assume, to - wit: the sun, the terrestrial globe, than span above us of aerial blue, the head of man, seat of his intellect and organ of his will.
Throughout the middle ages it was a prevalent belief that the ugliness of the wicked - and the wicked were very ugly - was in precise proportion to their wickedness, and so the spirit of Evil himself was ever pictured as abominably hideous and revoltingly frightful; very unlike the 'not less than Archangel ruined,' as his outward presentment portrayed by Milton. "As ugly as sin, diabolically hideous,' are phrases to be found in other languages besides our own. In the same way virtue and goodness, the attributes of the saint, the characteristics of the angle, are habitually linked both in idea and expression, with either majestic charms or enchanting loveliness. "As beautiful as an angel, Seraphie beauty,' are modes of expression familiar to our lips, and furthermore, it is usual enough, when the desire is to convey approbation of a certain line of conduct to say such conduct was decidedly handsome."
"Hereby we discover the connection which unconsciously, perhaps, subsists in our minds between things which are lovely"- Cornhill Magazine
Title: Beauty and Ugliness.
Author: Unknown for Cornhill Magazine
Location: Unknown
Year: Unknown
Media: Newspaper article, glued to Page 172 to the Ledger of Captain W. B.
Blair
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