artificial, the breath being sent forth through the closed teeth,
and almost entirely at the corners of the mouth--and, with all
this, a weariness often about the wrinkling forehead and the
drooping lids;--all these, which are growing too common, not among
the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think, of
the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual. At
least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the
same race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in
those old Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and,
it must be said, in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough,
Copley, and Romney. Not such, one thinks, must have been the
mothers of Britain during the latter half of the last century and
the beginning of the present; when their sons, at times, were
holding half the world at bay.

And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she
goes to the seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but
herself in salt--the very salt-water, laden with decaying
organisms, from which, though not polluted further by a dozen
sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself, anointing, too, with oil,
ere he was fit to appear in the company of Nausicaa of Greece?
She dirties herself with the dirty saltwater; and probably chills
and tires herself by walking thither and back, and staying in too
long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garments which,
for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have set
that Greek Nausicaa's teeth on edge, or those of any average
Hindoo woman now. Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and
benches all the weary afternoon, her head drooped on her chest,
over some novel from the "Library;" and then returns to tea and
shrimps, and lodgings of which the fragrance is not unsuggestive,