The women of England, not to say of Scotland, have of late years lain under the reproach that they are ceasing to be possessed of the fatal gift of beauty. I am well aware that there is not a reviewer exercising his calling between Land’s End and John o’ Groats who will not profess to foam at the mouth on the strength of this statement. Yet the fact remains that ugliness is rapidly becoming the common heritage of English women and Scotch women alike. There is an old superstition, not, of course, tolerable to the minds of the smart people of to-day, that wickedness, or, not to put too fine a point upon it, ugliness of temperament is calculated gradually to induce ugliness of physique. Without going into the question of the general[92] wickedness of Anglo-Saxon femininity, we may put it down for a scientific fact that the beauty of them is wearing away—let us hope to the land of the leal. In those remarkably ?sthetic organs which sell fifty process-block portraits per week for sixpence, we are treated continually to what the editors take for types of English beauty. You pay your sixpence and you open your hot-pressed beauty-show. On the first page—that is, of course, after the advertisements—you have a speaking presentment of something with elaborate hair and an inexhaustible fund of torso which, frankly, might pass very well for a sign to a public-house called “The Bald-faced Stag.” Beneath you read in capital letters “Miss or Mrs. So and So—The Famous Beauty.” No woman in England apparently is allowed to know whether she be beautiful or not until either Mr. Keble Howard Bell or Mr. J. M. Bulloch has so labeled her; Bell and Bulloch being, of course, the only possible judges of feminine beauty England possesses.[93] In the politest circles it is quite dangerous to praise a woman’s good looks without reference to the files of The Sketch and The Tatler. A certain nobleman, however, is understood to have earned something of a reputation for himself as connoisseur by openly avowing his contempt for both sheets, and surreptitiously swotting up the picture pages of the Daily Mirror. This, however, like the Daily Mirror, is probably neither here nor there. The solemn fact remains that the beauty of England’s fairest daughters and Scotland’s bonniest lasses alike, has become a doubtful quantity. Any person who is troubled with qualms on the subject need only visit a Court, or the Opera, or Messrs. Peter Robinson’s, or an A. B. C. shop, or a mothers’ meeting. Hard faces, bleary eyes, saw teeth, humpy shoulders, and an undignified gait, not to mention greasy complexions, scanty hair, bony hands and knock knees, are the rule and not the exception among English womankind. We have scarcely a beauty[94] left, even at the Gaiety Theater. In fact, leaving out the ravishing pictures of the illustrated press, there are really only two beautiful women in England, and both of these are married to reviewers. Now, I say and maintain that any male person, possessed of an eye for the charms of what is commonly called the opposite sex, will find that in Ireland the decay of female beauty has not yet commenced. Whether he be in Dublin or in Cork, in Sligo or in Limerick, pretty women take his vision—as the daffodils take the winds of March—at every corner. In fine, it may be said without exaggeration that if Ireland possesses a characteristic which renders her entirely different from the countries to which, on the face of it, she displays a sort of second hand, tumble-down resemblance, it is the prettiness of her women. I take it for granted that this trait has been commented upon by other travelers; but I do not think that it has heretofore been in any sense properly impressed upon the public mind. It is[95] generally understood among artists that Irish women have delicate hands and an eye with a sparkle about it. Irish poets, in more or less halting English verse, have done their best to indicate that Irish women are, to say the least of it, worth looking at. But I am not aware that on the whole the literature about Ireland insists, to anything like a reasonable degree, on the beauty of Irish women. If the present work were from the “exquisite” pen of Mr. Arthur Symons, our failure adequately to portray the beauty of Erin’s daugh............