Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton

Chapter III: Part 3

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In the whole history of English letters, there can be found no sadder chapter than that which contains the story of Sheridan’s death. The body out of which the breath was fast going, and from which intelligent action had entirely gone, was seized by sheriff’s officers for debt, and only by the threats of attending physicians did it escape being carried to a low sponging-house, wrapped in nothing but the blankets that covered the bed on which it lay. The “life and succor” his friends had begged were denied him, and “Westminster Abbey and a funeral” were all he received. As a French journal said at the time, it only proved that “France is the place for a man of letters to live in, and England the place for him to die in.” Sheridan’s appearance during his last hours was thus depicted by one who saw for himself the havoc made: “His countenance was distorted under the writhings of unutterable anguish. Pain and the effects of pain were visible on that sunken cheek; and on that brow which had never knitted under oppression, or frowned upon the importunities of the unfortunate, pain in its most acute form had contracted there its harsh and forbidding lines.... Still, amid those rigid lines which continuous suffering had indented there, you might perceive the softer and more harmonious tracings of uncomplaining patience, fortitude in its endurance, and resignation in its calmness.” This is the face exhibited here—one of the most unpleasant to look upon which the collection contains, notwithstanding Sheridan’s own boast, not very long before his death, that “his eyes would look up as brightly at his coffin-lid as ever.” His spirits did not fail him so long as consciousness remained, and when asked by the attending surgeons if he had ever before undergone an operation, he replied, “Only when sitting for my portrait, or having my hair cut.” It is to be regretted that this last portrait for which he sat, should be so worn and weary in its expression. Moore, in his _Life of Sheridan_, did not mention the taking of the mask, although he spoke of the plaster cast of Sheridan’s hand, under which some keen observer had written:

“Good at a fight, better at a play,
God-like in giving—but the devil to pay.”

Concerning Moore’s own appearance, Leigh Hunt wrote: “Moore’s forehead was bony and full of character, with ‘bumps’ of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. His eyes were as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine leaves; his mouth generous, and good-humored with dimples.” Scott said in his _Journal_, in 1825: “Moore’s countenance is plain, but the expression is very animated, especially in speaking or singing, so that it is far more interesting than the finest features could have rendered it.” In 1833 Gerald Griffin made a visit to Moore at Sloperton, and thus described Moore himself: “A little man, but full of spirits, with eyes, hands, feet, and frame forever in motion.... I am no great observer of proportions, but he seemed to me to be a neat-made little fellow, tidily buttoned up, young as fifteen at heart, though with hair that reminded me of ‘Alps in the sunset’; not handsome, perhaps, but something in the whole cut of him that pleased me.”

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A year later, N. P. Willis, who _was_ a great observer of proportions, met Moore at Lady Blessington’s, and thus recorded his observations: “His forehead is wrinkled, with the exception of a most prominent development of the organ of gayety, which, singularly enough, shines with the lustre and smooth polish of a pearl, and is surrounded by a semicircle of lines drawn close about it like intrenchments against Time. His eyes still sparkle like a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings about the corners.... His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight, and changeable as an aspen, but there is a set look about the lower lip—a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can almost see wit astride upon it.... The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of the expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, radiates.”

This was Moore as others saw him when he was in his prime. His later years were clouded by a loss of memory, and a helplessness almost childish. The light of his intellect grew dim by degrees, although Lord John Russell said that there was never a total extinction of the bright flame. He died calmly and without pain; and the cast of his face certainly reflects much that Willis had drawn in his _Pencillings by the Way_.

Sheridan said once of a fellow-Irishman that Burke’s “abilities, happily for the glory of our age, are not intrusted to the perishable eloquence of the day, but will live to be the admiration of that hour when all of us shall be mute, and most of us forgotten.” Burke, in all his relations, was a better man than Sheridan, and he met, as he deserved, a better fate. He fell asleep for the last time with Addison’s chapter on “The Immortality of the Soul” under his pillow, and with the respect and gratitude of all England at his feet. The mask of Burke was offered for sale—and was sold—in London a few months ago, with a certificate from Mr. Edward B. Wood, stating that it was made by the especial desire of Queen Charlotte on the day of Burke’s death. The name of the artist is unknown, but he is said to have received two hundred guineas for the work. After the death of her Majesty the mask was given by George IV. to C. Nugent, his gentleman-in-waiting, from whom it came into the possession of his nephew, Mr. Wood. This original mask, from the Queen’s cabinet, is now the property of The Players. It is very like the familiar portrait of Burke by Opie.

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George Combe had a mask of Curran in this country, of which mine, no doubt, is a replica, as it bears a strong resemblance to the established portraits of Curran. Its existence does not appear to have been known to the sculptor of the medallion head of Curran on the monument in St. Patrick’s, Dublin, for that was avowedly taken from the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. A short time before his death Curran wrote to a friend that his “entire life had been passed in a wretched futurity,” but that happily he had found the remedy, and that was to “give over the folly of breathing at all.” He ceased to breathe at all in Brompton, London, in the autumn of 1817; and his bones, now buried in Dublin, were laid for some years in a vault of Paddington church.

We learn from various sources that Curran was under the middle height, “very ugly,” with intensely bright, black eyes, perfectly straight jet-black hair, a “thick” complexion, and “a protruding underlip on a retreating face.” Croker, speaking of his oratory, said: “You began by being prejudiced against him by his bad character and ill-looking appearance, like the devil with his tail cut off, and you were at last carried away by his splendid language and by the power of his metaphor.”

The mask of Lord Palmerston was taken immediately after death at Brockton Hall, by Mr. Jackson. Only one cast was ever made—that which is in my collection—and upon this was based the head upon the statue of Palmerston by Mr. Jackson, now in Westminster Abbey. The Marquis of Lorne, in his _Life of Palmerston_, says: “Some of us may have seen him rise quickly and lightly, when nearly fourscore, from his seat in the House of Commons, and speak with clearness and directness but no attempt at eloquence, and often with some hesitation, at the table; his black frock-coat buttoned across the well-knit and erect figure of middle stature, his sentences spoken towards the bar of the House; his gray short hair brushed forward and the gray whiskers framing the head erect on the shoulders. Some may remember, under the shaven chin, the loose bow-knot, neatly tied at the throat, the bit of open shirt-front, with standing collar.” His appearance in 1837 is thus described: “Lord Palmerston is tall and handsome. His face is round and of the darkest hue. His hair is black, and always exhibits proofs of the skill and attention of the _friseur_. His clothes are in the extreme of fashion. He is very fond of his personal appearance.” And Sir William Fraser sketched him as he appeared to a later generation: “Lord Palmerston on horseback looked a big man, and standing at the table of the House he did not appear ill-proportioned. Each foot, to describe it mathematically, was ‘a four-sided, irregular figure.’ His portraits in _Punch_ are very like him. Those with a flower or straw in the mouth are the best. He had a very horsy look.”

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The death-mask of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, as here shown, was found by me a year or two ago in the out-of-the-way little shop of a mould-maker in Chelsea. It was taken by Sir Edgar Boehm, and the nose in the cast was broken, evidently intentionally and wantonly, by some malicious person who wished, perhaps, in this iconoclastic way to express with emphasis his political opinions. Despite its mutilated condition it is of great interest to all lovers and admirers of the original.

The best pen-portrait of Disraeli as well as the most familiar, is that 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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

After a careful study of all the Florentine galleries in the winter of 1892-93, I failed to find this copy of the Cromwell mask or any record of its ever having existed there, although the Pitti Palace contains an original portrait of Cromwell from life by Sir Peter Lely, which was presented by the Protector to this same Grand Duke Ferdinand II.

The mask of Henry IV., that darling king whose praises still the Frenchmen sing, has also a curious history. During the French Revolution, as is well known, the tombs of the Bourbons and the Valois at St. Denis were desecrated by the citizens of the republic. And when they began to “empty the rat-hole under the high altar,” to use the words of one of their own leaders, the first coffin they came upon was that of Henry of Navarre. The body was discovered to have been carefully embalmed, and it was enveloped in a series of narrow bands of linen, steeped in some chemical preparation. The face was so well preserved that even the fan-shaped beard seemed as if it had been but recently dressed. The upper part of the brain had been removed, and was replaced by a sponge filled with aromatic essences. Enormous crowds came from Paris to look upon what was left of the monarch who once wished that all his subjects might have capon for their Sunday dinners; and undoubtedly some one of them made this cast of his face. It is still a common object in the plaster shops of Paris; and, painted a dark green to match the lintel of his door, it serves to-day as a sign and a symbol for a dealer in plaster images who does business in one of the side streets near upper Broadway, New York.

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M. Germain Bapst, writing in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, October, 1891, described a bust of Henry in wax which is preserved at Chantilly; and he proved it to be the work of G. Dupré, who, according to Malherbe, a contemporary historian, went to the Louvre the day after the king’s death to make the wax effigy for his funeral, and took with him the modeller, who made a cast from the king’s features. Concerning this cast itself the writer was silent; but he stated, although without giving his authority, that the plaster cast here reproduced dates back only to the time of the exhumation.

A scarce contemporary French engraving, entitled “Henri IV. Exhumé,” represents the king as standing upright in an open coffin, against one of the great stone pillars in the vaults of St. Denis. The body is wrapped in strips of cloth, like an Egyptian mummy, but the head and shoulders are entirely exposed. A long inscription, at the bottom of the print, explains that “on this occasion a plaster cast was taken of the face—_on a moulé sur la nature même le plâtre_—from which to-day artists make their portraits of the great sovereign. The drawing upon which this engraving is based was executed by an eyewitness, and it shows the exact and marvellous state of preservation in which the body of the founder of the Bourbons was discovered. There was an effort made by the National Assembly to preserve this precious relic; but, alas, it was too late.” The original mask of Henry is now in the Library of Ste. Geneviève, in Paris.

Charles XII. of Sweden was a soldier and little else. He knew no such word as fear. He was haughty and inflexible. He never thought of consulting the happiness of his people. He ascended the throne of a nation rich, powerful, and happy; he died king of a country which was ruined, wretched, and defenceless. Whether or not he was killed by one of his own soldiers, history has never been able to determine. He was shot in the head at the siege of Frederickshald, in Norway, in 1718; and when his body was exhumed and examined, a hundred and fifty years later, “the centre of his forehead was found to be disfigured by a depression corresponding with a fracture of that part of the skull.” The fatal missile had passed entirely through the King’s head from left to right in a downward direction; and in the cast in my collection the indentures, particularly the larger one on the right temple, are clearly perceptible. An engraving of this death-mask, dated 1823, contains the legend that it was “made four hours after he was shot, and was taken from the original cast preserved in the University Library at Cambridge, by Angelica Clarke.”

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The copy of this cast in the British Museum is from the Christy collection. Henry Christy is known to have been in Stockholm at the time of the sale of the effects of Baestrom, the Swedish sculptor, and he is believed to have purchased it then and there. It contains more of the top and back of the head than the cast here reproduced, and it bears, very unmistakably, evidences of the bullet wounds in the temples. This cast, the wax mask of Cromwell mentioned above, and a cast of the face of James II. of England, are the only things of the kind the British Museum possesses.

Lavater wrote with unbounded enthusiasm of the impression made upon him by the face of Frederick the Great, whom he once saw in life. “Of all the physiognomies I have ever examined,” he said, “there is not a single one which bears so strongly as this does the impress of its high destiny. The forehead, which forms almost a straight and continued line with the nose, announces impatience against the human race, and communicates the expression of it to the cheeks and lips,” etc. And Mr. Fowler, who knew Frederick only by his portraits, ascribed to him fine temperament, intense mentality, great clearness and sharpness of thought, with a tendency to scholarship, and especially to languages, and with immense acquisitiveness.

Carlyle wrote: “All next day the body [of Frederick] lay in state in the Palace; thousands crowding, from Berlin and the other environs, to see the face for the last time. Wasted, worn, but beautiful in death, with the thin gray hair parted into locks and slightly powdered. And at eight in the evening, Friday, 18th [of August, 1786], he was borne to the Garrison-kirche of Potsdam, and laid beside his father in the vault behind the pulpit there.”

The original of this cast of Frederick the Great is in the Hohenzollern Museum in Berlin, and of course is authentic. My own copy I brought from Berlin some ten years ago, with the consent of the authorities of the Museum.

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Concerning the personal appearance of General Grant, Mr. William A. Purrington, of New York, thus writes in a private letter, which he has kindly permitted me to make public:

“When I first knew the General I was a school-boy, and of course felt the school-boy’s awe of a great man. Privileged to know him for years in the intimacy of his own home, I never entirely overcame that feeling. What was heroic in him grew, and did not diminish. The more I saw of him the more I felt that he was good as well as great. His face used to be called sphinx-like. That was scarcely true, for although its expression was always calm, strong, imperturbable, it was also one of great gentleness. He surely was a gentleman. Perhaps his hands aided to keep his face serene, for we must all have some safety-valve. Almost the only external indication of annoyance I ever noticed in him was a nervous opening and shutting of his fingers, an index of emotion often observed by other of his more intimate friends. A notable illustration of this trait was told me by a gentleman who once accompanied him to a large public dinner given in his honor. At its close one of the guests ventured upon the telling of stories which are not told _pueris virginibusque_. The General’s fingers began to work; he quietly excused himself; and his companion, who knew the significance of the gesture, followed him. As they smoked their cigars on the streets of the foreign city in which this occurred, the General said: ‘I hope I have not taken you from the table, but I have never permitted such conversation in my presence, and I never intend to.’ This was not an affectation. His mind, clear and wholesome, left its imprint in his face. Grossness or scandal gave him genuine discomfort. He loved to think well of his kind. This trait showed in his face, gave it benignity, and was, I fancy, the secret of his hold on the affections of men. We chanced to be alone in his room one night after the last cruel betrayal of his confidence, he walking to and fro by the aid of his crutch. Suddenly he stopped, and, as if following aloud the train of his silent thought, he said: ‘I have made it a rule of my life to believe in a man long after others have given him up. I do not see how I can do so again.’ There was no bitterness in his voice, not even an elevation of tone. It was simply an exclamation of an honest heart sorely wounded in its belief.

“As I recall his face, that which I remember is not so much line and contour as the expression of strength, of great patience, of calmness, and of gentleness; and the incidents which illustrate pure qualities also come back freshly to my memory.

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“He had, too, a merry face; at times a merry eye. He was full of sly humor. The twinkling of his eye and his quiet laugh promptly rewarded an amusing story. In his own home his face was always kind and responsive. There he was not the silent man the world thought it knew, but a fluent and well-informed talker on all that was of interest to him. Undoubtedly, however, he had the gift of silence, and when he saw fit to exercise it his face became a mask, conversation ceased to be among the possibilities, and a chat with a graven image would have been a relief at such a time. He became then, and designedly, a silence-compeller. When there was nothing to be said, he said nothing.”

General Grant, on the occasion of the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox Court House, was thus described by General Horace Porter, his aide-de-camp: “He was then nearly forty-three years of age, five feet eight inches in height, with shoulders slightly stooped. His hair and full beard were a nut-brown, without a trace of gray. He had on a single-breasted blouse, made of dark-blue flannel, unbuttoned in front, and showing a waistcoat underneath. He wore an ordinary pair of top-boots, with his trousers inside and without spurs. The boots and portions of his clothes were spattered with mud. He had had on a pair of thread gloves of a dark yellow color, which he had taken off on entering the room. His felt ‘sugar-loaf,’ stiff-brimmed hat was thrown on the table beside him. He had no sword, and a pair of shoulder straps was all there was about him to designate his rank. In fact, aside from these, his uniform was that of a private soldier.”

This was thoroughly characteristic of the simplicity and modesty of the man. He came, in the face of the whole admiring world, to make his lasting mark upon one of the most important pages of his country’s history, the General of his country’s armies, perhaps the greatest soldier of his time, without a spur and without a sword, in the well-worn uniform of a private of Volunteers.

He died as bravely and as quietly as he had lived, like one who had even studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owned, as ’twere a careless trifle. He sleeps now on the banks of the Hudson, in that enduring, honorable peace for which he had fought so long, and which he had won so gloriously. His body was greatly wasted by lingering disease, but those who saw him immediately after death say that his face looked ten years younger than it had looked during the previous trying months.

The cast of Grant here presented is still in the possession of his family in New York; and it is the only copy ever made with their consent, and to their knowledge.

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Of General Sherman, General Porter said: “He was a many-sided man, who had run the entire gamut of human experience. He had been merchant, banker, lawyer, professor, traveller, author, doctor, president of a street railway, and soldier. Wherever he was placed, his individuality was conspicuous and pronounced. His methods were always original, and even when unsuccessful they were entertaining. He could not have been commonplace if he had tried.” There was certainly nothing commonplace in his personal appearance. His frame was tall and wiry; his hazel eyes were sharp and penetrating; his nose was aquiline; his beard was short and crisp; his mouth was firm and tender; his bearing was courtly, unpretentious, and dignified. He was the typical soldier in appearance and action; like Grant, he was entirely devoid of any outward expression of vanity, self-esteem, or self-consciousness. As he was one of the bravest, so was he one of the gentlest, kindest, most sympathetic of men. The mask of General Sherman was made immediately after his death, under the direction of Mr. St. Gaudens.

Washington was as blessed in his death as in his life. He rests still upon the banks of the Potomac, among the people whom he so dearly loved and among whom he died; and no later administration has ever cared to cut off his head for exhibition on the roof of the Patent Office or the Smithsonian Institution.

At least two plaster casts were taken from the living face of Washington. The first, by Joseph Wright, in 1783, was broken by the nervous artist before it was dry; and the subject absolutely, and, it is whispered, profanely, refused to submit to the unpleasant operation again. The second was made by Houdon, the celebrated French sculptor, in 1785, and from it was modelled the familiar bust which bears Houdon’s name.

The original Houdon mask of Washington is now in the possession of Mr. W. W. Story, in his studio in Rome. He traces it directly from Houdon’s hands, and naturally he prizes it very highly. It has been preserved with great care, and of it he says “there is no question that it was made from the living face of Washington, and that therefore it is the most absolutely authentic representation of the actual forms and features of his face that exists. In all respects, any portrait which materially differs from it must be wrong.” Mr. Story cannot account for the fact that the sculptor opened the eyes of Washington in the mask, except upon the supposition that he did not remain long enough at Mount Vernon to have studied and modelled the eyes for his bust from the face of Washington himself.

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It is but just to add here that Mr. Story says that never, to his knowledge or belief, has a cast been made from the original which he owns. He examined the so-called cast in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington, and he was fully satisfied that, like all the other specimens in existence, it is of no value in itself, and was made from a worn-out copy of the bust. The Washington mask here presented is from a photograph taken by Mr. Story in Rome, and from his own copy.

The attempt of the sculptor Browere to take a life-mask of Thomas Jefferson was not more successful, and was much more disastrous, than Wright’s attempt upon the face of Washington. Mr. Ben Perley Poore quotes Clark Mills as telling the following story: “The family of the ex-President were opposed to it, but he finally consented, saying that he could not find it in his heart to refuse a man so trifling a favor who had come so far. He was placed on his back on a sofa, one of his hands grasping a chair which stood in front. Not dreaming of any danger, his family could not bear to see him with the plaster over his face, and therefore were not present; and his faithful Burwell was the only person besides the artist in the room. There was some defect in the arrangements made to permit his breathing, and Mr. Jefferson came near suffocating. He was too weak to rise or to relieve himself, and his feeble struggles were unnoticed or unheeded by his Parrhasius.

“The sufferer finally bethought himself of the chair on which his hand rested. He raised it as far as he was able, and struck it on the floor. Burwell became conscious of his situation, and sprang furiously forward. The artist shattered his cast in an instant. The family now reached the room, and Browere looked as if he thought their arrival most opportune, for though Burwell was supporting his master in his arms, the fierce glare of the African eye boded danger. Browere was permitted to pick up his fragments of plaster and carry them off, but whether he ever put them together to represent features emaciated with age and debility, and writhing in suffocation, Mills did not know.”

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The mask of Jefferson in the fragmentary condition described above would be of little value even if it had been preserved.

When Houdon came to America in 1785 to make the bust of Washington, he was the companion of Benjamin Franklin, and he was, in all probability, the author of this cast of Franklin’s face, taken in Paris that year as a model for the well-known Houdon bust of Franklin, which it somewhat resembles. The original mask was sold in Paris for ten francs after the death of the artist in 1828.

The familiars of Franklin have shown that his face in his old age changed in a very marked degree. He was in his seventy-eighth or his seventy-ninth year when he sat for Houdon in 1784-85. Many of the features of the Franklin cast as here reproduced—the long square chin, the sinking just beneath the under lip, the shape of the nose, and the formation of the cheekbones—are strongly preserved in the face of one of his great-granddaughters now living in Philadelphia.

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Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence HuttonChapter III: Part 3

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