of N. P. Willis, who saw him, in his youth, at Lady Blessington’s. It
says: “He was sitting in a window looking on Hyde Park, the last rays of
sunlight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly
embroidered waistcoat. Patent-leather pumps, a white stick with a black
cord and tassel, and a quantity of chain about his neck and pockets,
served to make him a conspicuous object. He has one of the most
remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy
of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem to be a victim
of consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus and has the most mocking,
lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a
kind of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth,
as he does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of
expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy
of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in
waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls on his left
cheek almost to his collarless stock, which on the left temple is parted
and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl. The conversation
turned upon Beckford. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of
the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he
clothed his description. He talked like a race-horse approaching the
winning-post, every muscle in action.” This is the Disraeli whom D’Orsay
drew.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: BENJAMIN DISRAELI]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. T. Wemyss Reid thus sketches Disraeli in later life: “Over the high
arched forehead—surely the forehead of a poet—there hangs from the crown
of the head a single curl of dark hair, a curl which you cannot look at
without feeling a touch of pathos in your inmost heart, for it is the
only thing about the worn and silent man reminding you of the brilliant
youth of _Vivian Grey_. The face below this solitary lock is deeply
marked with the furrows left by care’s ploughshare; the fine dark eyes
look downward, the mouth is closed with a firmness that says more for
his tenacity of will than pages of eulogy would do; but what strikes you
more than anything else is the utter lack of expression upon the
countenance. No one looking at the face, though but for a moment, could
fall into the error of supposing that expression and intelligence are
not there; they are there, but in concealment.”
Mr. W. P. Frith, in his _Autobiography_, more than once alludes to the
devotion of Mrs. Disraeli to her husband, and he quotes John Phillips as
describing the painting of Disraeli’s portrait. After the subject and
his wife had seen the sketch, during the first sitting, the colors being
necessarily crude, the lady returned hastily to the studio, and said to
the painter: “Remember that his pallor is his beauty!”
Dr. Wilde, afterwards Sir William Wilde, published in Dublin, in 1849, a
volume entitled _The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life_, a very
interesting book now long out of print. It is an elaborate defence of
Swift’s sanity, and it contains a full account of the plaster mask taken
from the Dean’s face “after the _post-mortem_ examination.” From this,
he said, “a bust was made and placed in the museum of the University,
which, notwithstanding its possessing much of the cadaverous appearance,
is, we are strongly inclined to believe, the best likeness of
Swift—during, at least, the last few years of his life—now in
existence.” Speaking of this mask, Sir Walter Scott wrote: “The
expression of countenance is most unequivocally maniacal, and one side
of the mouth (the left) horribly contorted downwards, as if convulsed by
pain.” Dr. Wilde, on the other hand, said: “The expression is remarkably
placid; but there is an evident drag in the left side of the mouth,
exhibiting a paralysis of the facial muscles of the right side, which,
we have reason to believe, existed for some years before his death.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: JONATHAN SWIFT]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Wilde compared this cast of Swift’s face, taken immediately after
death, with the cast and drawings of his skull made in 1835, ninety
years later, when the bodies of Swift and Stella were exhumed, and their
craniums examined by the phrenologists belonging to the British
Association; and by careful analysis of both, he was able to satisfy
himself that Swift was not “a driveller and a show” when he died, nor a
madman while he lived. He gave, upon the sixty-second page of his book,
a drawing of this mask in profile, and the face is certainly identical
with the face in my collection. It resembles very strongly the accepted
portraits of Swift, particularly the two in which he was drawn without
his wig. The more familiar of these is a profile in crayon, by Barber,
taken when the Dean was about sixty years of age—and eighteen years
before his death—which has been frequently engraved for the several
editions of Lord Orrery’s _Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan
Swift_, first published in 1751. The original cast was made in two
parts, according to Dr. Wilde, and the difference in surface between the
rough hinder part—not existing in my copy—and the smooth polished
anterior portion, as here seen, shows at once that the back of the head
was added at a later date. Two lines of writing, greatly defaced, found
upon the cast attest this to be “Dean Swift taken off his ... the night
of his burial, and the ... one side larger than the other in nature.” In
a foot-note to the second edition of his work, Dr. Wilde said: “The
original mask remained in the museum T.C.D. [Trinity College, Dublin]
till within a few years ago [1849], when it was accidentally destroyed.”
The history of this replica—for replica it certainly is—before it came
into my hands I have never been able to trace. It found its way into the
shop of a dealer in curiosities, who knew nothing of its pedigree, not
even whose face it was; and from him I bought it for a few shillings. It
is one of the most interesting of the collection, and perhaps the most
valuable, because the most rare. It is hardly the Swift of our
imagination, the man whom Stella worshipped and Vanessa adored; and, Dr.
Wilde to the contrary, notwithstanding, one cannot help feeling while
looking at it that Swift’s own sad prophecy to Dr. Young was
fulfilled—“I shall be like that lofty elm whose head has been blasted; I
shall die first at the top.”
At least one of the biographers of the Irish dean died as Byron often
feared to die, “like Swift, at the top first.” Sir Walter Scott’s decay
was a mental decay in the beginning of his last illness; but happily for
him, and for his family, the axe was laid at the root of the grand old
monarch of the forest of Scottish letters before the upper branches were
permitted to go to utter ruin.
There exist at Abbotsford two masks of its first laird—a life-mask and a
death-mask. Of the former very little is known except that it is said to
have been made in Paris. The latter was exhibited at the Scott Centenary
Celebration in Edinburgh, in 1871, when it attracted a great deal of
attention. They both show, as no portrait of the living man shows,
except the familiar sketch by Maclise in the Fraser Gallery, the
peculiar formation of his head, and the unusual length above the eyes.
Lockhart, in his account of Scott’s last hours, said: “It was a
beautiful day; so warm that every window was wide open, and so perfectly
still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ears—the gentle
ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles—was distinctly audible as we knelt
around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes. No
sculptor ever marbled a more majestic image of repose.”
He does not mention the taking of the death-mask, however, and nowhere
alludes to it. It was made by George Bullock—it is said, at the request
of Dr. Spurzheim—and Bullock and Chantrey both used it in modelling
posthumous busts of the bard. It was loaned to Sir (then Mr.) Edwin
Landseer while he was painting his full-length portrait of Sir Walter,
with the background of the scenery of the Rhymer’s Glen.
Bullock supposed that the original mould was destroyed not long after
Scott’s death, but Mr. Gourlay Steel writes that his brother, Sir John
Steel, while engaged upon the monument to Lockhart at Dryburgh Abbey,
some years later, came upon it accidentally at Abbotsford, and used it
in remodelling his bust of Sir Walter for Mr. Hope-Scott.
Chantrey, in comparing the measurements of Scott’s head from this mask
with the measurements he had made of the head of Shakspere on the
Stratford monument—which latter he had always considered unnatural, if
not impossible—found, to his great surprise, that they were almost
identical in height from the eyes up; and in each case he noticed the
very unusual length of the upper-lip. It was this dome-like feature of
Scott’s head which inspired one of his jocular friends in Edinburgh to
hail him once, when he dragged himself up the stairs of the Session
House with his hat in his hand, as “Peveril of the Peak.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Carlyle last saw Scott—they never met to exchange a word—it was in
one of the streets of Edinburgh, late in Scott’s life; and, “Alas!”
wrote the younger man, “his fine Scottish face, with its shaggy honesty
and goodness, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it, and
ploughed deep with labor and sorrow.”
Eighteen months after the death of Scott, the Burns mausoleum at
Dumfries was opened to receive the remains of Burns’s widow, when,
according to the appendix to the first edition of Allan Cunningham’s
_Life of Burns_, then going through the press, a cast was taken from the
cranium of the poet. Mr. Archibald Blacklock, surgeon of Dumfries, who
made the examination, declared that “the cranial bones were perfect in
every respect, and were firmly held together by their sutures,” etc.,
etc. Unfortunately there is no cast of the head of the poet, living or
dead, except this one here shown of his fleshless skull. George Combe,
who received a replica of it from the executors of Mrs. Burns, presented
a number of wood-cuts of it, in various positions, in his _Phrenology_,
and he was very fond of using it to point his morals.
It is unusually large, even for the skull of a Scotchman; and viewed
laterally, its length, due to the magnitude of the anterior lobe, is
enormous.
Combe frequently reproduced the skull of Robert the Bruce, shown here as
well, although he failed to explain the mystery of its existence in
plaster. The skeletons of Bruce and his queen were discovered early in
the present century by a party of workmen who were making certain
repairs in the Abbey Church of Dunfermline. The bones of the hero of
Bannockburn were identified from the description of the interment in
contemporary records, and from the fact that the ribs on the left side
had been roughly sawn away when the heart was delivered to Sir James
Douglas, and sent off on its pious and romantic, but unsuccessful,
pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The skull of Bruce, in an excellent state
of preservation, was examined carefully by the Phrenological Society of
Edinburgh, then in the highest tide of its enthusiasm and prosperity;
and with the consent of the Crown, this cast of it was made. A gentleman
who wrote anonymously to _Notes and Queries_, August 27, 1859, some
forty years later, said that he remembered distinctly seeing and
handling this skull, and the great sensation its discovery created. It
was reinterred in its original resting-place a day or two later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: ROBERT BURNS]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: KING ROBERT THE BRUCE]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The London _Times_ contained, not very long ago, the following curious
advertisement: “Napoleon I. For sale, the original mask moulded at Saint
Helena by Dr. Antomarchi. Price required, £6000. Address,” etc., etc.
Dr. F. Antomarchi, a native of Corsica, and a professor of anatomy at
Florence, at the request of Cardinal Fesch and of “Madame Mère,” and
with the consent of the British government, went to Saint Helena in 1819
as physician to the exiled Emperor. He closed his master’s eyes in
death; and immediately before the official _post-mortem_ examination,
held the next day, he made the mask in question. He said in his report
that the face was relaxed, but that the mask was correct so far as the
shape of the forehead and nose was concerned. And unquestionably it is
the most truthful portrait of Bonaparte that exists.
When Napoleon thought himself closely observed, he had, according to Sir
Walter Scott, “the power of discharging from his countenance all
expression save that of an indefinite smile, and presenting to the
curious investigator the fixed and rigid eyes of a marble bust.” As he
is here observed, no matter how curiously or how closely, he is seen as
he was. It is the face of Napoleon off his guard.
Bonaparte’s distinguishing traits were selfishness, combativeness,
destructiveness, acquisitiveness, secretiveness, self-esteem, and love
of approbation. He had some vague notion of benevolence and of
veneration, but he was blind to the dictates of truth and of justice,
and he was so utterly deficient in conscientiousness that he does not
seem to have been conscious of its existence.
His entire character was summed up once in four broken-English words, by
an ignorant little local guide in Berlin. Fritz, showing a party of
Americans through the royal palace at Charlottenburg, worked himself up
to a pitch of patriotic frenzy in describing the conduct of the parvenu
French Emperor during his occupancy of the private apartments of the
legitimate German Queen, and he concluded his harangue by saying,
quietly and decidedly, “But then, you know, Napoleon was no gentleman!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: NAPOLEON I.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That seems to tell the whole story. He was, in his way, the greatest man
who ever lived. He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial
town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and
sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European
countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had
been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote
history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so
little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was _no_ gentleman!
The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are
known to exist. The copy in the Paris Mint—_Hotel des Monnaies_—is
without the gilded wreath which this copy possesses. It is said to have
“been taken from the Emperor’s face at St. Helena, twenty hours after
his death.”
The mask of Napoleon III. was taken, of course, at Chiselhurst. Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte was distinguished, particularly, as being the only
Bonaparte, for four generations at least, who bore no resemblance
whatever to the Bonaparte family, not one of the strongly marked facial
traits so universal in the tribe appearing in him.
No matter what may have been his shortcomings in other respects, he was
devoted to his mother and to her memory. She used to call him “the
mildly obstinate;” and the maternal judgment, perhaps, was mildly
correct. Kinglake expressed it more epigrammatically when he said that
“his characteristic was a faltering boldness.” The historian of the
Crimea, in his account of the attempt at Strasburg in 1836, pictured
Prince Louis as “a young man with the bearing and the countenance of a
weaver—a weaver oppressed by long hours of monotonous in-door work,
which makes the body stoop and keeps the eyes downcast.” Those half-shut
eyes impressed every one who saw the Third Napoleon in life. He was
called by Madden, in his _Memoirs of the Countess of Blessington_, “the
man with the heavy eyelids, with the leaden hand of care and calculation
pressing them down—the man-mystery, the depths of whose duplicity no
Œdipus has yet sounded—the man with the pale, corpse-like, imperturbable
features.” Neither Mr. Kinglake nor the chosen biographer of the
Blessingtons, however, was an impartial witness. Henry Wikoff, on the
other hand, declared that his face recorded resolution, and that his
eyes, which he kept half closed, revealed subtlety as well as daring.
“His manner,” according to the Chevalier, “was graceful, composed, and
very _distingué_. He had the air of a man superior by nature as by
birth.” And Mrs. Browning believed in him and trusted him, and called
him “the good and the just.” He was perhaps the mildest-mannered man who
ever scuttled ship of State, or cut a political throat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: NAPOLEON III.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The cast of the dead face of Oliver Cromwell, which was for some years
in the cabinet of the Mint at Washington, bears the following
inscription—copied _verbatim_:
_This Mask is from the
original one descended
from Richard, Protector
in poss: Mrs. Russell
Chesthunt Park._
-------
BORN DIED
1626 RICHARD 1712
left them to his dau.
1650 ELIZABETH 1731
to her cousins
1695 RICHARD—THOMAS
1759 left the mask
to his dau:
ANNE ELIZ EX^{ctrs.}
they left it to
OLIVER CROMWELL
he left it to
his daughter
MRS. RUSSELL.
In 1859 it was presented by Henry M. Field, Queen’s Assay Master at the
London Mint, and a direct descendant of Cromwell, to the late William E.
Du Bois, who was for nearly half a century an officer of the mint at
Washington. Shortly before his death the latter gentleman removed it to
his own house; and it is now in the possession of his son, Mr. Patterson
Du Bois of Philadelphia, through whose kindness the pedigree given is
here printed.
Cromwell, according to the _Commonwealth Mercury_ of November 23, 1658,
was buried that day at the east end of the chapel of Henry VII., in
Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley accepted this as an established fact,
notwithstanding the several reports, long current, that the body was
thrown into the Thames, or laid in the field of Naseby, or carried to
the vault of the Claypoles in the parish church of Northampton, or
stolen during a heavy tempest in the night, or placed in the coffin of
Charles I. at Windsor, Mr. Samuel Pepys being responsible for the last
wild statement. After the Restoration this same Mr. Pepys saw the
disinterred head of Cromwell in the _interior_ of Westminster Hall,
although all the other authorities agree in stating that, with the heads
of Ireton and Bradshaw, it adorned the outer walls of that building.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: OLIVER CROMWELL]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It may be stated, by the way, that a trustworthy friend of Mr. Pepys,
and a fellow-diarist, one John Evelyn, witnessed “the superb funerall of
the Lord Protector.” He was carried from Somerset House in a velvet
bed-of-state to Westminster Abbey, according to this latter authority;
and “it was the joyfullest funerall I ever saw, for there were none that
cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise,
drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went.” It does not
seem to have occurred to Mr. Evelyn, or to other eye-witnesses of the
funeral, that this was a mock ceremonial, and that the actual body of
the Protector was not in the hearse.
Both Horace Smith and Cyrus Redding, early in the present century, saw
what they fully believed to be the head of Cromwell. It was then in the
possession of “a medical gentleman” in London. “The nostrils,” said
Redding, “were filled with a substance like cotton. The brain had been
extracted by dividing the scalp. The membranes within were perfect, but
dried up, and looked like parchment. The decapitation had evidently been
performed after death, as the state of the flesh over the vertebræ of
the neck plainly showed.”
A correspondent of the London _Times_, signing himself “Senex,” wrote to
that journal, under date December 31, 1874, a full history of this head,
in which he explained that at the end of five-and-twenty years it was
blown down one stormy night, and picked up by a sentry, whose family
sold it to one of the Cambridgeshire Russells, who were the nearest
living descendants of the Cromwells. By them it was sold, and it was
exhibited at several places in London. “Senex” gave the following
account of the recognition of the head by Flaxman, the sculptor: “Well,”
said Flaxman, “I know a great deal about the configuration of the head
of Oliver Cromwell. He had a low, broad forehead, large orbits to his
eyes, a high septum to the nose, and high cheekbones; but there is one
feature which will be with me a crucial test, and that is that instead
of having the lower jawbone somewhat curved, it was particularly short
and straight, but set out at an angle, which gave him a jowlish
appearance. The head,” continued “Senex,” “exactly answered to the
description, and Flaxman went away expressing himself as convinced and
delighted.” Another, and an earlier account, dated 1813, says that “the
countenance has been compared by Mr. Flaxman, the statuary, with a
plaster cast of Oliver’s face taken after his death [of which there are
several in London], and he [Flaxman] declares the features are perfectly
similar.”
Whether or not the body of the real Cromwell was dug up at the
Restoration, and whether his own head, or that of some other
unfortunate, was exposed on a spike to the fury of the elements for a
quarter of a century on Westminster Hall, are questions which, perhaps,
will never be decided. The head which Flaxman saw, as it is to be found
engraved in contemporary prints, is not the head the cast of which is
now in my possession, although it bears a certain resemblance thereto.
Mine is probably “the cast from the face taken [immediately] after his
death,” of which, as we have seen, several copies were known to exist in
Flaxman’s time. It is, at all events, very like to the Cromwell who has
been handed down to posterity by the limners and the statuaries of his
own court. Thomas Carlyle was familiar with it, and believed in it, and
he avowedly based upon it his famous picture of the Protector: “Big
massive head, of somewhat leonine aspect; wart above the right eyebrow;
nose of considerable blunt aquiline proportions; strict yet copious
lips, full of all tremulous sensibility, and also, if need were, of all
fierceness and rigor; deep, loving eyes, call them grave, call them
stern, looking from under those shaggy brows as if in lifelong sorrow,
and yet not thinking it sorrow, thinking it only labor and endeavor; on
the whole, a right noble lion-face and hero-face; and to me it was royal
enough.”
The copy of the Cromwell mask in the Library of Harvard College is thus
inscribed: “A cast from the original mask taken after death, once owned
by Thomas Woolner, Sculptor. It was given by him to Thomas Carlyle, who
gave it, in 1873, to Charles Eliot Norton, from whom Harvard College
received it in 1881.”
A copy of this mask in plaster is in the office of the National Portrait
Gallery, in Great George Street, Westminster; and a wax mask, resembling
it strongly, although not identical with it, is to be seen in the
British Museum. This latter, which is broken in several places, lacks
the familiar wart above the right eyebrow. There is no record of either
of these casts in either institution, and the authorities and experts of
both have no knowledge as to how and when they found their way to their
present resting-places. Rev. Mark Noble, in his _House of Cromwell_,
however, said that the representative in London of Ferdinand II., of
Tuscany, bribed an attendant of Cromwell to permit him to take in secret
“a mask of the Protector in plaster of Paris, which was done only a few
moments after his Highness’s dissolution.” “A cast from this mould,” he
added, “is now in the Florentine Gallery. It is either of bronze, with a
brassy hue, or stained to give it that appearance.” Elsewhere Mr. Noble
said, writing in 1737, that “the baronial family of Russell are in
possession of a wax mask of Oliver, which is supposed to have been taken
off while he was living.”