Winckelmann, indeed, observes that the head of Scipio the elder, in the Palazzo Rospigliosi, executed in basalt of a deep green, is very beautiful. But, in that case, it is the form, not the color, of the head, that is beautiful. While greenness of complexion would not be beautiful in a man, it would certainly be hideously ugly in a woman. Moreover, while, in a dead black or any dark color of face, it cannot be pretended that, considering its color only, we should have more than blackness or darkness for admiration, it is evident that, in a fair complexion, we have, in addition to its general brilliance or splendor, the infinite variety of its teints, their exquisite blendings, and the beautiful expression of every transient emotion. I have now only to expose the sophistry which Payne Knight has employed upon this subject. "I am aware," he says, "indeed, that it would be no easy task to persuade a lover that the forms upon which he dotes with such rapture, are not really beautiful, independent of the medium of affection, passion, and appetite, through which he views them. But before he pronounces either the infidel or the skeptic guilty of blasphemy against nature, let him take a mould from the lovely features or lovely bosom of this masterpiece of creation, and cast a plum-pudding in it (an object by no means disgusting to most men's appetite), and I think he will no longer be in raptures with the form, whatever he may be with the substance." Now, it happens that a grosser incongruity can scarcely be supposed than that which exists between lovely features or a lovely bosom and a plum-pudding, or between the sentiment of love and the propensity to gluttony; and therefore to place the substance of the pudding, in which internal composition is alone of importance, and shape of none, under the form of features or a bosom, in which internal structure is unknown or unthought of, and shape or other external properties are alone considered, is a gross and offensive substitution, intended, not to enlighten judgment respecting form, but to pervert it, and to degrade the higher object by comparison with the lower one. The shape, moreover, is a true sign in the one case, and a false one in the other.--Of nearly similar character is the following:-- "If a man, perfectly possessed both of feeling and sight--conversant with, and sensible to the charms of women--were even to be in contact with what he conceived to be the most beautiful and lovely of the sex, and at the moment when he was going to embrace her, he was to discover that the parts which he touched only were feminine or human; and that, in the rest of her form, she was an animal of a different species, or a person of his own sex, the total and instantaneous change of his sentiments from one extreme to another, would abundantly convince him that his sexual desires depended as little upon that abstract sense of touch, as upon that of sight."