less; and lovers then, and perhaps particularly now, have found
the perfect beauty in faces to which Messer Firenzuola would have
denied the name of face at all, by virtue of a quality which
indeed he has tabulated, but which is far too elusive and
undefinable, too spiritual for him truly to have understood,--a
quality which nowadays we are tardily recognising as the first
and last of all beauty, either of nature or art,--the supreme,
truly divine, because materialistically unaccountable, quality of
Charm!

"Beauty that makes holy earth and heaven May have faults from
head to feet."

O loveliest and best-loved face that ever hallowed the eyes that
now seek for you in vain! Such was your strange lunar magic,
such the light not even death could dim. And such may be the
loveliest and best- loved face for you who are reading these
pages,--faces little understood on earth because they belong to
heaven.

There is indeed only one law of beauty on which we may
rely,--that it invariably breaks all the laws laid down for it by
the professors of aesthetics. All the beauty that has ever been
in the world has broken the laws of all previous beauty, and
unwillingly dictated laws to the beauty that succeeded it,--laws
which that beauty has no less spiritedly broken, to prove in turn
dictator to its successor.

The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done
exactly what their critics forbade them to do. The obedient in