rously, that he had brought him low, and shrewdly broken him. "Look on his head, and you shall find a grey hair for every line I have written against him, and you shall have all his beard white too, by the time he hath read over this book." Shirley, who is more to be admired as a poet than beloved as a man, for nothing can justify the vindictive exultation, with which he alludes in his dedication of "The Bird in a Cage," to the cruel and arbitrary punishment inflicted on Prynne * by the Star Chamber.-Shirley had a face "Half-minted with the royal stamp of man, And half o'ercome with beast." Though he turned Catholic in his dotage, he took orders in the Church of England in his youth, in spite of all the influence which Laud (then only president of St. John's College, Oxford, but still the same ferocious bigot, when confined within the narrow walls of his college, as he afterwards proved himself to be, when his power extended far and wide beyond them) exercised to prevent it, not on account of any immorality in his behaviour, but on account of an excessively large mole which disfigured, and indeed nearly covered, his left cheek. Nature threw the body of Corneille in perverse mould; for it was, like his conversation, dull, heavy, and unpleasant. Don Bonaventure d'Argone, or rather the witty Frenchman who wrote under that Spanish appellation, says, that the first time he saw that great tragic poet, he took him for a petty shopkeeper of Rouen, and could hardly believe that so much genius could be concealed under so mean and unpromising a husk. Gaçon, who assailed the moral character of Jean Baptiste very pleasantry of Nashe, who indeed calls his pamphlet "A full Answer to the eldest Son of the Halter-maker." According to Nashe, Gabriel took his oath before a justice, that his father was an honest man, and kept his sons at the university a long time. I confirmed it, and added, "Ay, which is more, three proud sons, who, when they met the hangsman, their father's best customer, would not put off their hats to him."-Akenside was the slave to a similar infirmity of judgement. He could never bear any allusion to be made to his lameness, because it reminded him of an accident he had suffered from the fall of a cleaver in the shop of his father, who was a butcher at Newcastle. How much more manly was the conduct of Dr. Prideaux, the bishop of Winchester, who, when exalted to the bench, was so far from disowning his original poverty, that he used to show the humble dress which he wore when he first went to Oxford in the capacity of a servitor, as a memorial of it. 典 Shirley, who called himself her Majesty's Servant, admitted that he dedicated "The Bird in a Cage" to Mr. W. Prynne, "Utter Barrister of Lincoln's Inn," on account of the aptness of its title to Prynne's situation at the time. In the course of his dedication the poet congratulated the lawyer on "the happy retirement" to which his fates had consigned him, and cut several other jokes, equally feeling and witty, on the sentence which the infamous Court of Star-Chamber had passed upon him. But we ought not to wonder that a court poet adopted such a tone towards a victim of court oppression, when we find one of Prynne's judges, a man of high rank and character, setting the example of it on his trial. The Earl of Dorset, in sentencing that inflexible patriot, used this language-"I should be loth that he escape with the loss of his ears only;-for then he may get a periwig, which he now so much inveighs against, and so hide their loss, or force his conscience to make use of his unlovely love-locks on both sides. Therefore I would have him branded on the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropped too." Be it recollected, to the eternal disgrace of those Stuarts, whom it is again becoming the fashion to eulogize, that they suffered this sentence to be carried into execution; and that too, merely because Prynne had written against the plays and lovelocks, which were patronized by that weak and revengeful Queen, Henrietta Maria. It must have galled Charles to the quick, at the close of his reign, to find that Prynne, the man whom his cruelty had thus mutilated and disfigured, was almost the only member of Parliament who dared to oppose himself with heart and soul to the formation of the High Commission, which was instituted to bring its monarch to the scaffold. Rousseau with the foulest slanders, has left a description of his personal appearance, of which the fidelity is not disputed. "Il est marqué d'un mauvais coin,' Et l'estime moins du foin." Shenstone, who wasted his genius, meant for better things, on pastoral poetry, and his fortune, given for nobler purposes, on his garden of the Leasowes, had a very awkward and clumsy figure for an Arcadian shepherd, or even for an English gentleman. This was also the case with Darwin, who was particularly coarse and uncouth in feature, and laboured under a very considerable impediment of speech. Lord Lyttelton had a face rendered meagre partly by ill-health, and partly by study, and also a slender uncompacted frame, which gave to his tout-ensemble a very ungracious and ungraceful look; whilst Thomson, whom he loved as a poet and patronized as a man," shone sleek with full-cramm'd fat" of laziness, in spite of an unanimated countenance, and a large, gross, and uninviting carcase. It is recorded of Thomson, that in mixed company he was almost always silent; a point in which he resembled many authors of higher character than himself: Butler and Addison will naturally recur to every man's mind. Dryden, whose colloquial talents are so highly extolled in the " Pirate" by the Great Unknown, was altogether unconscious of the possession of them-for in one of his minor poems he frankly admits that "Nor wine, nor love could ever make him gay, To writing bred, he knew not what to say." And Corneille goes still further in a letter to Pelisson, and unhesitatingly confesses that he was never heard with pleasure except when he expressed his sentiments through the mouth of another. "Et l'on peut rarement m'ecouter sans ennui, Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui." I am unwilling to prolong this article any further, but I feel that I should be doing injustice to my subject, were I not to mention, that three of the most atrocious ruffians, that ever preyed upon the happiness of mankind, were mis-shapen monsters, who, in the words of Shakspeare, were “curtailed of fair proportion," and "cheated of feature by dissembling Nature." Suetonius has bequeathed to us a vivid portrait of two of them in his lives of Caligula and Nero; and there are thousands still in existence, who recollect the "grim front" of the third, the sanguinary Robespierre. It is a singular fact, that Caligula, instead of concealing, took pride in displaying his deformity; and that he spent many hours at his looking-glass in studying how to give additional ferocity to a countenance, which was in itself sufficiently horrid and ferocious. Robespierre endeavoured, on the contrary, to erase, by the assistance of art, the assassin-like stamp with which Nature had impressed him, and was even bold enough to rouge and paint, and be a Muscadin at Paris, when the mere fact of being so was considered a qualification for the guillotin. Those who are anxious to learn what sort of man Nero was, have only to ask the ingenious author of "Sandoval" what sort of man Ferdinand of Spain is; for he asserts that the fat neck, † projecting belly, and thin shanks, which distinguished the one, distinguished the other; and that their faces are so much alike, that ancient medallions of Nero have been seized and broken by the police of Madrid, as infamous caricatures upon the "absolute King." The readers of Shakspeare will naturally add to this list *Caligula vultum naturâ horridum ac tetrum ex industriâ efferebat, componens ad speculum in omnem terrorem ac formidinem."-Suet. in vit. Calig. § 50. +Nero fuit corpore maculoso et fœdo-vultu pulcro magis quam venustocervice obesâ, ventre projecto, gracillimis cruribus."-Suet. in Ner. § 51. 2 B Oct. VOL. XVII. NO. LXX. another name, which is never mentioned without execration,-I mean that of Richard the Third, whom our immortal bard has described as a little, withered, crooked, hump-backed abortion. Horace Walpole, though he has not succeeded in whitewashing the moral character of that prince, has, in my opinion, fully proved that his person has been most unjustly aspersed and caricatured. The falsehood of his arm being withered is sufficiently attested by the undisputed fact of his having slain one and struck down another of Richmond's standard-bearers in the last desperate charge which he made on Bosworth field. Walpole has dexterously availed himself of the indirect evidence, which Philip de Comines and the Abbot of Croyland-both of them Richard's contemporaries-bear as to his not having a deformed person; and also of the direct evidence, which the old Countess of Desmond, and Dr. Shaw, who preached his Coronation-sermon, bear as to his having a comely person; but has strangely overlooked the secondary testimony of other witnesses, who go a long way in establishing the same point. Bucke, in his "History of the Life of Richard the Third," informs us, that "John Stowe, a man indifferently inquisitive after the verbal relations and persons of princes, and curious in his description of their features and lineaments, could find no note of deficiency in this king, but hath acknowledged viva voce, that he had spoken with some ancient men, who, from their own sight and knowledge, affirmed that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature:" and in a recorded MS. book, chained in his time (1625) to a table in the chamber of the Guildhall of London, the same writer adds, that he saw a Latin Epitaph on King Richard, which he subjoins, with this title, as his phrase runs, prefixed to it, "To give you him in his draught and composition, he was of a mean or low compact, but without disproportion or unevenness either in lineaments or parts, as his several pictures present him," and so on. Whitelaw, the Scotch ambassador, chimes in well with this account in a complimentary speech, which he delivered to Richard on the marriage of his master with one of the ladies Neville, Richard's cousin. After praising the mildness of his reign, Whitelaw proceeds to descant on the grace of his figure, which he would scarcely have done, had it been notoriously deformed; and alluding to the diminutiveness of Richard's stature, applies to him the lines in which Statius described Tydeus: Nunquam tantum animum natura minori Rous, the antiquary of Warwickshire, who had seen Richard twice, and who, be it recollected, was a strong Lancastrian, is the only contemporary author, who speaks of him as ill-proportioned; and yet his words-"parvæ staturæ erat, curtam habens faciem et inæquales humeros"-do not warrant any thing like "the mountain back," which Shakspeare has placed upon them. How the exaggeration first arose, is a question which Walpole has not examined, and which it is not my purpose at present to explore. After it was once invented, the policy of the reigning family would lead them to give it currency and circulation, whilst the vulgar would readily believe it from the natural connexion existing in their minds between acts of cruelty and monsters of deformity. Once raised into popular belief, the story would only want the aid of poetry to be transmitted from generation to generation; and after it had acquired that aid, the conversion of it into historical fact became almost a matter of course. The antiquary is often enabled to detect the falsehood of such anecdotes, by tracing them to their original source; but when his success is most complete, we scarcely thank him for his trouble, and often determine not to be undeceived. So true it is that fiction, tricked out with romantic incident, delights us more than historic truth; and that poetry, whilst it adds to its beauties, conceals its defects, and gives credence even to its improbabilities. It might have been as well, if Walpole had stated where he found the declaration which is put into the Countess's mouth. Η θαύματα πολλά, καί που τι καὶ βροτῶν φρένας ὑπὲρ τὸν ἀληθῆ λόγον χάρις δ ̓, ἅπερ ἅπαντα τεύ- καὶ ἄπιστον ἐμήσατο πιστὸν Pind. Olymp. 1. 43-52. But this is high matter, and deserves not to be mixed up with the gossiping intelligence I have strung together in this lecture on heads, or, if you like it better, this catalogue raisonnée of talent and deformity. N. S. CAPTAIN PARRY'S THIRD VOYAGE FOR THE DISCOVERY OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. IN casting our eyes upon the map of the world, we can scarcely avoid being struck with the appearance of a certain uniformity of configuration, as to all the general outlines of the two Continents. In both, the land is widely outspread throughout all the latitudes which approach the Northern Pole; and, in both, the land every where tends to converge to a point, as it approaches either the Equator or the Southern Pole. The Old Continent, which, under the seventieth parallel of north latitude, stretches from the coasts of Lapland and Norway, to those of Kamtschatca, over a hundred and seventy leagues of the earth's surface, terminates, south-easterly, in the peninsulas, or points of land, which form the Malay Peninsula, Cape Comorin, and the rest; and, finally, and at its south-western extremity, in the point or peninsula called the Cape of Good Hope. The New Continent, subjected to the same order of form, spreads, under the same seventieth parallel of north latitude, and from Behring's Strait to the easternmost coasts of Greenland (if Greenland, as the writer of these remarks will be found still to suspect, is portion of that Continent) through a hundred and fifty degrees of longitude; while (to say nothing of Cape Farewell, which constitutes the southern extremity of Greenland) the southern termination of that New Continent once more presents us with a point or peninsula ;namely, that of Cape Horn, on the western coast of America. All the great masses of land, therefore, which are discovered upon the surface of the earth, may be described, under general aspects, as severally affecting the shape of a wedge; and all these wedges of land are uniformly placed with their broad ends toward the North Pole, and with their points toward the south. The minor and subordinate examples of this order of configura tion, throughout the coasts of the two Continents, are innumerable; local obstacles to its prevalence may, here and there, discover themselves; but, as to the general rule, no instance is adducible in which it is reversed. But this uniform configuration of the terrene portion of the earth's surface cannot have been produced but through the operation of a cause adapted to the nature of the effect; and, in whatever way we account for the raising of the existing continents and islands from out of the bosom of the deep (a cosmogony in respect of which mankind appear to be universally agreed), the water-lines-the boundaries along the edges of the ocean-will hardly be referred to any other agency than that of the ocean itself. If the tops of mountains have been lowered, or broken into their present forms, by means of the action of the atmospherical fluids; so, also, the ground-plans of all the several portions of dry land have been narrowed and figured by means of the attrition of the restless ocean. But, again, if it is the currents of the ocean-if it is the flowing of water -that, by wearing away whatever yields to its force, and leaving in its place only that which more or less permanently resists its power-that has determined all the outlines of the dry land upon the globe; then, the general features and direction of those outlines will bear testimony to the general direction of the great currents of the ocean; to the general direction, or points of departure and approach, of that force, and the material exercising it, to which the terrene outlines are attributable. Now, these terrene outlines incontestably betray a motion, almost every where consentaneous, from north to south. Every where, the points of land, stretched far into the southern latitudes, proclaim a motion of the sea which is felt in a southern direction along their sides, which are thus tapered into the forms that we behold; and nowhere, or almost nowhere, are those points blunted or eaten away, by the motion of waters running from south to north. In a word, then, the terraqueous figure of the globe invites, at a first view, from every spectator, the unhesitating conclusion, that the ocean has its primitive fountains within the Arctic Circle; that it descends under the name of Atlantic, between the coasts of Europe and Africa, and those of America, as a mighty river between its distant banks; that it fills, as it pours along, the great bays, or gulfs, or mediterranean seas, upon the east and west (and of which number are the Baltic Sea, and the sea called the Mediterranean); that the force of its principal current, bearing the name of the Gulf-stream, is directed, first, against the eastern coast of Europe, and thence, by rebound, into the Gulf of Florida, after circling which, it divides itself east and west, and passes on the one side the Cape of Good Hope, to fill the basin of the Indian Ocean; and on the other Cape Horn, to fill that of the Pacific. But, the fountains, the head-springs of this mighty river of the briny fluid, are they really within the Arctic Circle; and, if the fountains are really there, into what vast receptacle-into what immeasurable lake-east, west, or south-does the ocean-river finally discharge itself? In point of fact, we are already sufficiently well-informed, as well of the geography as of the hydrography of the Arctic Circle, to be enabled to answer these questions satisfactorily. We know enough of the geography of the northern parts of both the Old and New Continents, to be able to say, that there exist but three possible water-communications-in the Pacific Behring's Strait, in the Atlantic Davis's Strait, and the Icy Sea, in which last lie the islands of Spitzbergen and Iceland, and to the southward of which last lie the British islands themselves. Now the discovery of Behring's Strait, and of the rapid current with which, at that inlet, the ocean pours itself northward, instead of southward, that is, in an opposite direction to that of the motion of its waters north of the Atlantic-serves at once to dispel any possible illusion as to the existence of the fountains of the ocean within the Arctic regions, and to explain to us into what receptacle the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific Oceans finally discharge themselves. In reality, the waters of the entire ocean move in a never-ending circle; entering what, for the present at least, we venture to call the Polar Basin, with rapidity and proportionate volume through the diminutive inlet of Behring's Strait, and returning southward through channels, or else through a single channel, of which it is more immediately the present purpose to speak. The reader's indulgence, in the mean time, is to be solicited. Conjecture, theory, hypothesis, inferences presumed to be drawn from insulated facts, are to be offered in place of positive knowledge;-probabilities only, and not proofs, are to be submitted;-a possible state of things is imagined-only to await confirmation or correction, and to suggest and stimulate inquiry. I. If, then, this theory of a constant circumvolution of the water of the ocean around the globe were received, or found receivable from facts, it would, in the first place, open a new view of the general economy of nature, or rather, a view of a new particular in that economy; but a particular, in strict harmony with all that had been previously known respecting it-with that general balance of adaptations and compensations which is so observable throughout universal creation, and by aid of which so many unexpected results are obtained, under circumstances which, until the machinery is known, appear wholly preclusive. The means which, in the economy of our globe, are resorted to, to moderate the heat of the tropical and equatorial regions, and to moderate the cold of the polar, have already been discovered under various aspects. The influence of the temperature of the sea in cooling the atmosphere, and consequently of providing, more or less, for the maintenance |