features; and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect.  Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of Robert Burns an honourable station among them.  Of Shakespeare’s we do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns be not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable—­the most like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be.  Raffaelle—­ the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford—­though without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy, formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence.  His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped.  Goethe, even in his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own will.  There is a self-conscious power, and purpose, and self-restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which might win worship, and did; but not love, except as the child of enthusiasm or of relationship.  But Burns’s face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed by the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets.  The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story.  The features certainly are not perfectly regular; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or colour:  but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling.  The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple, eager, gentle surprise—­a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth upon the wonder of a new-born world—­altogether

A station like the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.

Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence—­a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life—­a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man—­an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and unscientific, all but superstitious—­turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.