Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/124



THE MOUTH AND LIPS.

The home of smiles and merry laughter, the spot where love seals its vows, and friendship offers its warmest pledges, whence winged words bring to us, like carrier pigeons, the thoughts of other souls, the mouth next comes before us for study. Its parts and outlines must be in keeping with each other and with the remaining members of the face. Here, more distinctly than in any other feature, does a debased ancestry leave a vicious imprint, and a countenance please or displease us. More than one woman lives in history by her mouth.

There, for example, is Margaret Maultasche, Margaret the Pouch mouth, "rugged dragoon major of a woman," as Carlyle calls her, conspicuous enough in her day and generation, now five hundred years agone, not only by her thick lips and big mouth, but by her huge possessions in Austria, and the knack she had for