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Rome was growing for a thousand years, to the middle perhaps of our third century; but her decay was rapid, and her fall three centuries later was, to all appearance, complete. The first great blow she received was the effect perhaps of the wide-spread ravages in the population of the empire produced by natural causes soon after the era of the Antonines. The period from the year 170 to 270 after Christ, is the most melancholy,' says Carl Zumpt, of all Roman history, the era of the fall of antiquity in respect both to the State and to Nature.' The armies of Marcus Aurelius brought back a plague from Seleucia on the Tigris, which soon spread over the whole empire to Gaul and the Rhine, which reappeared repeatedly at short intervals, destroying both the soldiers and the people, and prostrating the spirit of the whole population. Famines followed upon pestilence, and pestilence in turn was generated again by famine. The barbarians penetrated into the provinces, and spread both the one scourge and the other. Earthquakes succeeded at a later period, and overthrew the works of an earlier and more vigorous age, which the exhausted nations had not the skill or the energy to repair. Cities lay in ruins, the arts died out, the rude processes of husbandry required an effort beyond the strength of perishing humanity. The Pagans Dion, Trebellius, and Zosimus, vie with the Christians Jerome, Eusebius, and Orosius, in describing a state of chronic affliction, which both parties in the state referred to the judgment of Providence, though of course with very different views. The great capitals of the provinces might offer asylums for the wretched and impoverished children of the soil, and the population of Rome, Milan, or Nicomedia might not yet suffer in numbers from the ruin which fell generally upon the Empire; just as Cork, Limerick, and Dublin have been swollen in our days by the fugitives of the great Irish famine: but the throngs of needy creatures thus admitted within their walls were not reproductive, and the sources of supply were the sooner dried up by this unthrifty and sudden influx. Before the end of the third century the condition of the Empire began slightly to improve, but Rome herself was already struck at her vitals. The reign of Diocletian marks her first sensible decline; the vast extent of that Emperor's Baths on the Quirinal, which exceed every other building of the kind at Rome, shows of itself how much the value of the soil had fallen almost in the heart of the city.

But Diocletian and his successors abandoned the city of Romulus, and the absence of the government showed how factitious were the grounds of its outward prosperity. For centuries Rome had been supplied with its population from the provinces; the deaths undoubtedly had very far exceeded the births within

the

the walls. In vain did Maxentius, and after him Constantine, erect some handsome buildings in the doomed city; the injury inflicted upon it by the final transfer of the seat of power to Byzantium was final and irremediable. Rome, still the capital of Paganism, was stricken with the palsy of the ancient faith. She became the outward symbol of decline, degeneracy, and destruction. In the fourth century she was visited by the Emperors with curiosity, and contemplated with respect, but with no remains of political interest; a small class of nobles continued to haunt her still sumptuous palaces, and to make a show of wealth, by spending all their fortunes in ostentatious luxury; but the mass of the people was sinking more and more deeply into irretrievable misery, or disappearing in successive generations from the scene, while none arrived from a distance to supply its place. The fifth century opened with the two abortive sieges of Alaric; in the third Rome was for the first time captured and sacked. About half a century later she was pillaged by the Vandals under Genseric. Again, in 472, she was plundered by Ricimer, and once more by Totila, in 546. The fifth and last of the barbarian conquests followed only three years later, when Totila made himself master of the city a second time. Thus, often taken and retaken, Rome suffered much from the evils of war and the horrors of licensed spoliation; but, in fact, the triumphs of peace over the old Roman civilization were more complete than those of war. The history of these vicissitudes, all tending in the same direction, is recorded by Gibbon and Bunsen, and now in still more detail by Mr. Dyer. It has been long agreed that Christian bigotry was more destructive to the works and monuments of Pagan art than Gothic fire; but neither the one nor the other, it may be believed, was half so ruinous as the slow unremitting sap of indifference and idleness, appropriating the materials of abandoned edifices to the vulgar necessities of the day. And yet after all, the activity of man's hands seldom keeps pace either in constructing or overthrowing with the steam power of Nature, and the elements themselves have undoubtedly borne the largest part in disintegrating the mightiest work of ancient pride and labour. Water and fire, alone or combined, have ever been the great creators and destroyers. Fires, lightnings, earthquakes, and inundations are ever changing the face and undermining the foundations of all human monuments; when they choose to put forth their powers, to these awful agents cities are no more than ant-hills, and the Coloseum than a house of cards.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Carl Gustav Carus: Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt. Leipzig. 1853.

2. Ueber Grund und Bedeutung der verschiedenen Formen der Hand in verschiedenen Personen. Stuttgart. 1846.

3. Atlas der Cranioscopie.

4. Die Proportionslehre der menschlichen Gestalt. Leipzig. 1854. 5. La Chirognomonie, ou l'Art de reconnaître les Tendances de l'Intelligence d'après les Formes de la Main. Par Le Caine S. D'Arpentigny. Second Edition. Second Edition. Paris. 1856.

6. Notes on Noses. London. 1852.

HE that professes to teach men how they may, with little

trouble, ascertain the characters of their neighbours, might excuse himself from the task of proving that his doctrine has a foundation in true science; for in the large majority of minds, curiosity, self-interest, philanthropy, policy, or the pure love of truth, would insure a favourable hearing for the promises of such knowledge. It might, therefore, seem a waste of time to preface a system of physiognomy with an essay to show that it seems, in all its parts, consistent with admitted facts and rules of science; but Carus, as becomes an accomplished comparative anatomist, has done this in the works before us; and we will follow his example, or, rather, go beyond it, in the design of justifying, by general considerations rather than by particular instances, the belief that each man's mental nature may be discerned in his external form. There are few, perhaps, who do not hold such a belief, few who do not often act on it in the ordinary affairs of life, but there are far fewer who could give good reasons for it, or who could not be dissuaded from it by the improbabilities which it seems to involve. Moreover, if it be generally admitted that certain indications of the mental character may be discerned in the body, yet some will hold that they are to be read in the face alone, which is the art of physiognomy as commonly practised; or in the head alone, as in phrenology; or in the transient expressions alone, as in the 'anatomy of expression;' few will believe that symbols of the mind are to be found in the fixed forms of every feature and member of the body, and that there are sound reasons why it should be so.

Now, the first general argument for the probability of such a science of symbols in the human form may be drawn from the nearly universal assent to it, implied in the practice of judging of men by their personal appearance. 'Every one,' says Addison, 'is in some degree a master of that art which is generally distinguished by the name of Physiognomy, and naturally forms to

himself

himself the character or fortune of a stranger from the features and lineaments of his face. We are no sooner presented to any one we never saw before, but we are immediately struck with the idea of a proud, a reserved, an affable, or a good-natured man; and upon our first going into a company of strangers, our benevolence or aversion, awe or contempt, rises naturally towards several particular persons before we have heard them speak a single word, or so much as know who they are. For my own part, I am so apt to frame a notion of every man's humour or circumstances by his looks, that I have sometimes employed myself from Charing Cross to the Royal Exchange in drawing the characters of those who have passed by me. When I see a man with a sour, rivelled face, I cannot forbear pitying his wife; and when I meet with an open, ingenuous countenance, I think on the happiness of his friends, his family, and his relations. I cannot recollect the author of a famous saying to a stranger who stood silent in his company-" Speak that I may see thee." But with submission I think we may be better known by our looks than by our words, and that a man's speech is much more easily disguised than his countenance.' Nor is the art confined to those who are grown up; for little children have, as by intuition, their loves and fears, their attractions and aversions, founded on the unreasoned judgments which they form from the aspects of those around them. Nay, we may go beyond our own race, since even the brutes that we bring about us in domestic life seem to judge of our minds from their observation of our features.

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The same general assent to the symbolic science is implied in the numerous familiar terms used to express the whole character of a man by speaking of a single member of his body. Such terms as 'long-headed,' shallow-brained,' 'brazen-faced,' 'supercilious,' 'hard-featured,' 'stiff-necked,' 'open-faced,' ‘hardmouthed,' a good hand,' 'a cunning hand,' and a hundred more that we could cite, are expressive only because it is generally true that the bodily characters which they describe are symbolical of the mental natures which they imply. Such terms are not all arbitrary or fanciful; many among them express the general belief in the correspondences not only of mind and body, but of mind and shape.

It is true that this general belief is vague, and not intelligent; but so are all general beliefs, and it is their wide diffusion, not their precision, which gives them weight in evidence. And, if it seem that an argument for any doctrine, drawn from the general assent to it, is enfeebled by the fact that the same assent is given to many popular errors, such as those about some of the influences

of

:

of the moon on weather and on mental disease, those about prophecies of death, and many similar fallacies, we answer, that these are all traditional errors; every child learns them from its elders but there is no such tradition in physiognomy; no child is taught it; rather every child practises it, as if by instinct, and every man who practises it improves his knowledge by his own unaided experience. Whatever probability, therefore, a doctrine may claim on the ground that it is generally assented to, this may be claimed for the physiognomy of the human form.

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But the assent is not only popular and inconsiderate. The best authorities among men, the keenest observers of all classes, have believed the doctrine, and have applied it. Those have done so who have been most eminent for knowledge of the world; for this knowledge includes the ability to tell, or guess well, at sight, what a man is, or will feel or do in certain events. It comprehends a swift and intuitive perception of character as displayed in form, and such a perception as penetrates far beneath the surface of emotional expressions, right into the foundation form, in which are the true symbols of the mind's nature. 'I conceive the passions of men,' says that consummate painter of character, Henry Fielding, 'do commonly imprint sufficient marks on the countenance; and it is owing chiefly to want of skill in the observer that physiognomy is of so little use and credit in the world.' His novels abound with instances of his faith in such indications. If Mrs. Tow-wouse,' he says in Joseph Andrews, had given no utterance to the sweetness of her temper, nature had taken such pains in her countenance that Hogarth himself never gave more expression to a picture.' And he adds a minute description of all her features in accordance with the characteristics which observation had taught him belonged to similar dispositions. So little did he hold the opinion which he puts into the mouth of one of his personages, that nobody would dream of looking in a man's face except to see if he had had the small-pox. In fact every novelist aims at a certain keeping between the nature and the appearance of the characters he depicts.

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It would not be difficult to collect a volume of passages from poets, implying their belief in the symbolical meanings of every imaginable form of feature; indeed, in all the poetry of human forms such meanings are assumed. I am very much of Lavater's opinion,' says Cowper, and persuaded that faces as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us: in fact, I cannot

are

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