Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/348

 must make on your book. Don't you leave your reader too often with an appeal to "the physician?" Why not tell more—or less?

—We feared that criticism; but what else could we do? People should be put on the watch against any deformity or disfigurement. They should know many local disorders are of constitutional origin. But we cannot make them specialists in the compass of three hundred pages duodecimo. Then, again

—That's always the way with authors. They bring you their MSS. and urge you to criticize freely; oh yes, freely and frankly. And every criticism you make, they at once set themselves to argue away, and prove to you that you don't appreciate and understand them.

—Well, I'll hear the other reasons another time. You just now said these arts are as old as civilization. Do any of the old writers, I mean the old, old ones, say anything about them?

—Yes, indeed; here's a volume by Dr. Rouber, Études Médicales sur l'Ancienne Rome. He gives you page after page of quotations from classic authors on cosmetics and such things. Why, Hippocrates himself has much to say on the care of personal beauty, as you might imagine any old Greek would. Even the genius of poets delighted to adorn such a charming theme. But let me read you a few lines of an author whose learning "cries in the top of mine." I mean