My Aunt Sally was a belle and a beauty in her day-for know, fair maiden, that the terms are not synonymous. Many a beauty never was a belle, and there have been belles who were no beauties. But my Aunt Sally was both, and my happiest occupation in childhood was to rummage the top drawer of her old-fashioned bureau (where was deposited a vast collection of lockets, rings, fans, antiquated billets-doux, and other memorials of lovers and admirers, now passed away or changed into unromantic grandfathers or great uncles), while my Aunt Sally sat by my side and gave the history of each flirtation as it was recalled to her mind. But far more valuable, in a practical point of view, was the moral with which she would point each tale, and the shrewd lessons in feminine tactics which she drew from the stores of her experience.

"Depend upon it, my dear," said she, flirting in her still delicate hand a beautiful fan adorned with figures after Watteau, "depend upon it, my dear, there's no use in loving a man too much; it bewilders you, and is no real satisfaction to him; you lose your presence of mind, and cannot really judge what will please him: it's quite enough to have him comfortably in love with you. Now, this fan-it was given me by a young Frenchman, who came over with Count D'Estaing, that winter we were all shut up in Boston. I do believe he would have left his country and turned republican for my sake, all for the love of 'mes beaux yeux;' but, child, do you think he would have offered to do such a thing if I had shown that I cared very much for him? Not he. Then it would have been quite enough for him to offer to take me off to France, to live in an old tumble-down chateau with his snuffy old father, the marquis, and his grand old mother, madame la marquise-and a pretty time I should have had of it, when the Revolution came. If I had got back to my own country at all, it would have been without my head, or, at least, with one fastened on with a broad black velvet ribbon, like the woman sitting under the guillotine, in the horrid German book you are so fond of reading. As it was, he only tore his hair, and gave me this beautiful fan when he left me; and how much better that was, for he soon got over it." It don't hurt a man half so much as you young girls think, to be refused," she continued, taking up a queerly folded billet-doux, which commenced with "Most respected and admirable Miss Sally," and looked as though Sir Charles Grandison had written it for Miss Harriet Byron. "Now this note-it's very prettily worded-I don't think young men know how to write notes to young women nowadays,

they are so free and familiar; well, this note-it was from a Maryland planter, one of the Calverts, a gentleman indeed; you never see such young men now, so courtly and dignified; he never met me without bowing over my hand. He was the first man I ever refused; and do you know I was simple enough to cry all night about it? Of course I couldn't have him, for your grandfather, you know, was a Puritan, a Winslow, and would never hear of a daughter of his marrying a follower of 'the Scarlet Woman;' but I thought he would never get over it; he said he never would, and next month he was engaged to his cousin! I knew better, after that, what men meant by saying they'd never get over it.'” Here my aunt Sally unrolled a piece of silver paper, and drew from it a lock of beautiful chestnut hair. I knew its gloss directly; it was her own. She rolled it over her finger, and half sighed as she went on "It's one thing to make a man fall in love with you, and another thing to keep him so. Any moderately pretty girl who has common sense can do the first, and many an ugly one too, if she has any kind of understanding of things; but most girls stop there, and let their lovers get into an everyday, matter-of-course way of loving. That's foolish: if a man isn't more in love with you at the end of the year than he was at the beginning, depend upon it you've made some mistake. It all depends on your not being too anxious about the matter yourself, for then you can be grave or gay, kind or cold, as you see best. I wonder what has become of the poor fellow who had this lock of hair! I let him keep it for a week. I suppose I ought not to have given it to him; but, dear me, I was always too good-natured, and it was the fashion just then to wear short curls. He came from the frontier -came in with the Continentals such a noble-looking fellow, and so devoted with such stories of forest life. I suppose he dreamed of taking me back to his cabin. It was well enough for him to dream, but we should bave made each other very unhappy; so I took back my lock of hair, and he went to Ohio."

While my aunt Sally was, half sadly, calling to mind the young hunter and soldier of the Revolution, I had taken a silk bag from the back of the drawer, and was drawing from it a package of letters. She took them from my hand, and, as she put them back, looked me in the face; her lips quivered, and tears filled her fine eyes as she said-"After all, my dear niece, to a true woman's heart the happiness of loving is far greater than the vain pleasure of being loved."

We have reserved for the subject of this paper those artificial helps to beauty, to the use of which feminine vanity, and that still stronger feeling (to which it is the handmaid)-the wish to appear attractive in the eyes of man-have at all periods, and in all parts of the world, led. Unlike other superfluities, the offsprings of luxury and refinement, we find the aborigines of America and the Cape as fond of enhancing, after their fashion, their charms with charcoal and red earth, as French ladies of the last century were lavish of pearl-powder and rouge. The intention is the same, however the pigments of the artists may vary. Nor is the universality of the practice more curious than its antiquity. The prophet Jeremiah speaks of rending the eyes with paint; and the toilet of Jezebel, mentioned in the Second Book of Kings, differs little from that of a modern actress, who paints her face, and brightens and enlarges the appearance of her eyes, by an application nearly similar, except that the material is Indian ink, instead of the powder of lead or antimony, which ladies in the East still use for this purpose.

The semi-pagan writer Tertullian, attributes the discovery of rouge, and the black powder for the eyelashes, to the researches of the fallen angels, who out of their knowledge of the hidden things of earth, and their love for the daughters of men, drew from the inmost recesses of nature whatever could add to or embellish the beauty of their mortal favorites-an idea which gives an antediluvian antiquity to this part of our theme, and subjects the daughters-in-law of Noah to the imputation of bringing back to earth the meretricious arts of their forebearers. At any rate, the books of the Old Testament, to which we have alluded, prove that at a very primary period of written history women (if not men, which some authors incline to think) aided their complexions with fucus; and, like the Arabian dames of whom Russel speaks (Moore, by the way, has quoted him in verse)

"Mixed the kohol's jetty dye

To give that long, dark languish to the eye."

A practice which, from the proofs furnished us in the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum, appears to have been as popular with the beauties of Thebes and Memphis as with the stately daughters of the Twelve Tribes.

Shaw, in his travels, tells us that the mode of using the lead ore amongst Eastern ladies, is by dipping a wooden bodkin about the roundness of a VOL. XLV.-27

quill into the powder, and drawing it afterwards between the eyelashes over the ball of the eye-a process well expressed in the prophet's phrase, "rending the eyes;" for this appears to be the ancient manner of using it, some of the vases and bottles which have contained sthem, as the Egyptians called the metallic color for the eyelids, having with them the pins, or styles, for laying on the pigment.

It was most probably from this people that those of ancient Greece and Rome borrowed their love of unguents and cosmetics, as well as their use of false hair and metal mirrors, and all the other artificial aids that luxury afterwards brought into vogue, as we find them on the buried toilets of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and which were as ordinary when Ovid wrote, as two hundred years after when Lucian described them.

From the Roman poet we learn that hair-dye was as much in demand in the city of the seven hills as in any modern metropolis we might mention; and that towers of false hair were worn by those to whom nature had been niggardly in this adornment, as well as false teeth, false eyebrows and eyelashes, and that pomatum, rouge, and white paint were in constant requisition. This latter "Pharian varnish," by the way, was procured from the entrails of crocodiles (numbers of which infested the island of Pharos, at the mouth of the Nile, from which its name was derived), and is said to have been excellent for taking off freckles and spots in the face, and for whitening the skin; but various herbal preparations were used for the same purpose.

Like the ancient Britons, who perhaps derived the taste from their conquerors, the Romans were great admirers of sunny or bright hair, the flava coma, which color they gave it artificially, as did the old inhabitants of our island, whose naturally fair locks were rendered brighter by the aid of a cosmetic.

"She

Even in comparatively modern times, we find this admiration of golden hair existing; but the poetry of the phrase cannot conceal that the hue occasionally degenerated into the objectionable color, which Hentzner, with good hearty truthfulness, tells us Queen Elizabeth affected at sixty-seven. wore false red hair!" a fashion which doubtless other ladies of the time were fain to follow. At one period we read that fashion became so fanciful upon the matter, that the fair votaries who followed her wore their hair of different colors, alternated according to taste.

According to the chronologists, fans, muffs,

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masks, and false hair, made their appearance in England almost simultaneously in 1572, having been imported from France, where they had found their way from Italy, under very questionable auspices. If this be correct, we may regard the "virgin queen" as the original patroness of the "invisible perukes," and "real heads of hair," which have never since fallen into desuetude, and according to the statements of their manufacturers, have just now attained to a perfection which in their modest phrase surpasses Nature herself. Powdering the hair is a comparatively recent innovation, and is said to have taken its rise from some of the ballad-singers at the fair of St. Germain, whitening their heads to make them look ridiculous. By what means it found its way from the fair-field to the court we know not; but that which began in buffoonery has since been made an appointment of the gravest offices, and though no longer tolerated by fashion, maintains its dignity as an appendage of the bishop's throne and the bar.

Twiss, who wrote his travels through Spain in 1773, remarks that the Macaroni ladies in Cadiz wore yellow powder in their hair, which to him was nauseous and disgusting. But he observes, with evident surprise at the omission, that though the habits of both sexes are entirely in the French fashion, they use neither paint nor patches. These last coquettish adjuncts, which in all probability first covered a blemish on the cheek or brow of beauty, appear to have come into request about the year 1672, when a book was published, entitled "New Instructions unto Youth for their Behavior, and also A Discourse against Powdering of Hair, Naked Breasts, Black Spots, and other unseemly customs." However Herbé, in his costumes, remarks that, in 1690, "Les dames conservaient l'usage du fard, des mouches, et des masques." And Addison tells us that the French baby for 1712, exhibited by the milliners at the Seven Stars in King Street, CoventGarden, and habited after the manner of the most eminent toasts in Paris, wore a small patch on her breast; and as we see in Hogarth's pictures, and the pages of the Spectator, even gentlemen resorted to the pretty affectation of wearing them. Sometimes they were placed upon the hand, to draw attention to its shape or whiteness; at others they served as notes of admiration to a dimple, or contrasted with the clear bright color of the cheek. At the court of Queen Anne, the fashion of wearing them appears to have reached its culminating point, but they lingered in the outskirts of fashion till within the child memory of our mothers.

Strutt tells us that the first mention he has found of the painting of the face in England, is in a very old manuscript of the fourteenth century, preserved in the Harleian library; but it would appear that

* 1610.

the exquisites of the opposite sex resorted to this effeminacy also; and during the regency of Katherine de Medici rouge was commonly worn by the gallants of the court. Even Henry the Third of France, at one time famous for his valor, fell into this unmanly delicacy; and while conspiracies were forming about him, felt only anxious to improve his complexion, for which purpose he covered his face at night with a cloth dipped in essences, though he painted over its effect in the day.

The editor of the "Court and Times of James the First," informs us that during this dissolute reign all the court ladies painted so exactly alike, that, with their hair frizzled and powdered, they could not be told one from another: and observes of the Countess of Bedford, who had returned to court (though in her sickness she in a manner vowed never to return there): "Marry, she is somewhat reformed in her attire, and forbears painting, which they say makes her look somewhat strangely among so many wizards, which, together with their frizzled, powdered hair, make them look all alike, so that you can scarcely know one from another at the first view."

Philters were commonly sold by medical empirics in this reign (as they had been long before), for the improvement or restoration of beauty; and the old herbalists, from Dr. Turner downwards, abound with floral specifics for the purpose.

Cowslips, gathered with the dew on them, and made into an ointment, or used as a wash, were said to be of great effect, and not only restored beauty when lost, but took away wrinkles! White roses were also deemed effective as beautifiers; and lady lilies, which, as well as the young leaves and tendrils of the vine, are said to have been made use of by the Roman beauties in their baths.

The bath, by the way, has always been an indispensable adjunct of the toilet; but in an old MS. book of Prognostics, of the time of Richard II., ladies are advised, that "in the months of March and November they should not goe to the bathe for beautye." In the mean while, however, here is a recipe "to make a fayr face," by "putting together the milk of an ass and a black kow, poured on brimstone, of each a like quantity; then anoynte thy face, so thou shalt be fayr and white." Asses' milk appears to have been from a very early period considered of great effect as a cosmetic. Poppæa, the wife of Nero, who is said to have been the most delicate woman with regard to her person, kept for the supply of her bath a train of five hundred milch asses in constant attendance. It was this fastidious lady who first introduced the use of the mask (which had hitherto only been used for theatrical purposes), as a preservative of the complexion-a fashion which, like most Roman ones, probably had its type in the East; the Arabian women, according to Carrei, wearing black masks, with little clasps prettily ordered; a fashion that, judging from the tenacity with which Eastern nations cling to antique

custom even in their costumes, is not likely to have been a modern innovation.

Such were the masks that in this country, during the sixteenth, and till the commencement of the seventeenth century, it was the fashion for ladies to wear whenever they walked or rode abroad, or went to the play, or other public place of amusement-a fashion in the high tide of which the fair wearers were famed neither for their prudery nor prudenee.

There must have been something amazingly piquant in the appearance of these silken visors, which in general covered only a part of the face, revealing a portion of the forehead, and reaching down to the bottom of the nose, so that the mouth and chin might be seen. This article appears to us to have been more coquettish than useful; it was not the true Poppaan instrument which the old Roman ladies wore over their faces in hot weather, to keep off the sun and wind, but a mischievous pretence, discovering more than it concealed, and enhancing by its pretty mystery the effect of whatever beauty lurked in red lips and rounded chin, or revealed itself in the brow.

In Shakspeare's time, this was not the only species in use; Autolycus, in the "Winter's Tale," in the list of his wares, sings of

"Masks for faces, and for noses;"

a distinction which would lead us to suppose that the whole mask and the demi-visor were then equally in vogue.

In the reign of Charles I., this appendage was universally worn; and from the queen herself to the smallest marchande de modes, no aspirant to fashion appeared in public without it. Everywhere the mask-on the mall, in the mulberry gardens* (the only place, as Evelyn tells us, for ladies of quality and their gallants to be exceedingly well cheated), at the play, the park, and the puppet show (for the Marionettes were even then in fashion)— everywhere the mask.

How curious a cavalcade does the following paragraph, a bit of court news in the days of the "nimble, quick, black-eyed, brown-haired," Henrietta Maria, as Dr. Mead calls the little French Queen of Charles I., how curious a cavalcade does it raise up in the imagination! "On Tuesday, the queen went by water to Blackwall, and then dined aboard the Earl of Warwick's fair ship called the Neptune; went thence by water to Greenwich; thence came on horseback to and through London; the Earl attending her Majesty to Somerset House, forty or fifty riding before bareheaded, save her four priests with black caps-herself and ladies in little black beaver hats, and masked, but her Majesty had a fair white feather in her hat!" This was in 1626; but

The mulberry gardens occupied the present site of Buckingham Palace.

in 1712, and even later, the mask had not wholly disappeared.

Except in pictures, no remnant of this antique appendage to dress appears to have been discovered amongst the unburied homes of Pompeii and Herculaneum; its materials were too perishable; and while the cosmetics (which according to the belief of the fair artificers) assisted the beauty of the face it protected-the perfumed unguents, rouge, and other toilet furniture, survive-the mask itself has mouldered.

To us the few steps (if any) that modern art has taken in advance of the ancients in these particulars, is one of the fairest signs of actual refinement and civilization. After more than 1800 years, we find the dressing-room of a lady of ancient Magna Græcia, as rich in all the artificial necessaries of the toilet as any Macaroni beauty's of the present time. The essence bottles, the vases of perfumes and oils, the pots for rouge and other paints, and vessels for collyriums of various kind, speak loudly for the Delcroixes and Atkinsons of that remote period, and prove that woman's vanity was at any rate as active a principle in the sex then as now.

Lucian, who lived in the reign of Trajan, has left his evidence, that the lava-sealed fate of these luxurious ladies by no means blunted the taste for endeavoring to improve natural beauty by art, but describes the dressing-room of a Grecian lady of his period as furnished with all the adjuncts of a modern beauty's toilet, all the cosmetic array of powder, figments, lotions, &c. &c. But we must not forget that most important appendage of the toilet, ancient and modern, and which at one period was absolutely a part of dress-the mirror.

Like the old Egyptians, both the Greeks and Romans made them of metal-small, and usually circular, with sometimes fancifully-shaped and elegantly-ornamented handles; a bronze one from Memphis, in the British Museum, has a handle in the shape of a lotus-sceptre, with the head of Athor, the Goddess of Beauty; and another equally appropriate, is formed in the shape of a tress of hair, with two hawks. Amongst the "Greek and Roman antiquities" in the same collection, we find one, the handle of which is formed by a Venus holding a dove!

Sometimes they were made of silver; and in a lane leading from the house of Sallust, in Pompeii, in which the skeleton of a lady, with those of three (supposed) attendants, were discovered, a silver mirror, such as the Roman and Grecian ladies always carried about them, was found near her.

Women in the East, we read, are never without them; and Shaw tells us, that in Barbary a looking

† Amongst the glass vessels found at Pompeii was one containing rouge similar to that worn at present.—Mrs. Starke.

glass is so favorite an appendage, that the feminine part of the inhabitants hang them at their breasts, and will not go without them, even when, after the drudgery of the day, they are obliged to go two or three miles with a pitcher or a goatskin to fetch water.

In other parts of Asia the ladies wear little mirrors on their thumbs; and those of the Harem not unusually have them set in the centre of their feather fans. In Spain, and anciently in England also, they might occasionally be seen flashing on the panache, or exterior ray of this instrument when folded.

In the days of Henry VIII., when the palace mirrors at Hampton Court were, as Strutt tells us, of steel, looking-glasses being very few, and very small, were then only used by ladies who kept them in cases, and being for the most part portable, car

ried them in their pockets, or locked them up with other trinkets; so that even in this particular the analogy between the customs of the toilet in classic regions and times, and in the semi-barbaric ones of our own country, is more complete than on a cursory glance one would imagine.

Patches no longer point the eye to a dimple, nor masks affect modesty while provoking inquisitiveness; and though hair-dye and rouge, pearl powder and lotions, still figure on the catalogues of the perfumers, bearing evidence that somewhere they are in demand, few of the consumers but have the grace to keep their obligations to such aids as quiet as possible-a very decided proof, that as refinement progresses we grow ashamed of such empiricism, and that woman is daily learning to trust to higher charms than mere physical beauty to make her a helpmate for man.

MARY HOWITT.

THERE are some things," says a periodical critic, "which women do better than men; and of these, perhaps, novel-writing is one. Naturally endowed with greater delicacy of tasto and feeling, with a moral sense not blunted and debased by those contaminations to which men are exposed, leading lives rather of observation than of action; with leisure to attend to the minutiae of conduct, and more subtle developments of character, they are peculiarly qualified for the task of exhibiting faithfully and pleasingly the various phases of domestic life, and those varieties which checker the surface of society. Women are less stilted in their style; they are more content to describe naturally what they have observed, without attempting the introduction of those extraneous ornaments which are sometimes sought at the expense of truth. They are less ambitious, and are, therefore, more just; they are far more exempt from that prevailing literary vice of the present day, exaggeration, and have not taken their stand among the feverish followers of what may be called the intense style of writing: a style much praised by those who inquire only if a work is calculated to make a strong impression, and omit entirely the more important question, whether that impression be founded on truth or on delusion.

To the dreamy rhapsodies and heated exhibition of stormy passions in which such writers indulge, Mary Howitt's works of fiction offer a very striking contrast; their perfectly truthful spirit finds a way at once to the heart, and succeeds in engaging our interest and in making us in love with human na

ture in situations and under circumstances rarely penetrated so successfully by the light of imaginstion, and consequently the character, incident, dia logue have made her tales as popular as they are instructive.

As a writer for the young, Mary Howitt has been long eminently successful, and it is no mean subject of congratulation to us to know that she is decidedly not of the class of individuals who have taken to write children's books simply because they found themselves incapable of writing any other, and who yet consider their childish books, which require no mind at all, to be of the same importance as children's books, which exercise powers of mind of no common class. To distinguish the difference between the two classes, and to find the eminent success of the latter in their combined object of instruction and amusement, we need go no further than to the juvenile readers themselves. With them, books written by those possessed of a great share of natural talent are invariably found to be most popular; and as an evidence of this truth we may remark that we have frequently been struck, when in the nursery, at seeing the well-thumbed tales and poems of Mary Howitt, and the delight with which its occupants dwelt upon and committed to memory the stores provided for their entertainment, even when they reached to the length of Madam Fortescue and her cat, that captivating tale of domestic treachery and sorrow. We cannot but feel assured that such poems for children come from a heart overflowing with love and interest for them and for their pursuits, and that she truly and sincerely utters her pretty lines