A good illustration of the vaunted Roman virtue is recorded in Porcia, the daughter of Cato, the wife of Brutus, who plunged a toilet-knife into her thigh, and kept it eight days in the wound, without complaining, to prove to her husband that her courage and her discretion rendered her worthy of entering into the conspiracy, which he meditated; and who also destroyed herself by swallowing burning coals, when she heard of his defeat. Obstinacy and insensibility were great sources of the crimes either perpetrated, or, by their lying historians, pretended to be perpetrated, under the name of Roman virtue. * * * * * It would be out of place, here, to enter farther into the character and expression of the face. Those whom these remarks dispose to do so, may refer to the physiognomical work, which I have been so often compelled to allude to.[43] To those who are satisfied, neither with the vague, though tasteful inspirations of Lavater, nor with the empyrical or unreasoned manifestations of Gall and Spurzheim, but who desire _the assignment of a reason for every description of physiognomical character or expression_, that work may afford some satisfaction. That the Greeks, either intuitively or reasonedly, distinguished the three species of beauty as to the figure, has been already seen. The heads of Diana, Venus, and Minerva, respectively present beauty of the locomotive, vital, and mental systems. CHAPTER XVI. COMBINATIONS AND TRANSITIONS OF THE THREE SPECIES OF FEMALE BEAUTY. As to the COMBINATIONS of beauty, it must now be observed, that some one of these species of beauty always characterize the same individual during every stage of life; and, to the experienced observer, it never is difficult to say which of them predominates. Attention to the preceding principles will render this easy. It is right to mention here the cause of this general predominance of one species of beauty over the rest. It depends on this, that the slightest original or accidental preponderance of strength in one system above that of the rest, though unobserved at first, leads to a more frequent employment of its functions, and therefore to a more perfect development of its organs, until at last the disproportion between these and those of the other systems, becomes characteristic of the individual. In a truly beautiful woman, none of the systems described can exist in a great degree of degradation; but of the three, the nutritive or vital system is to woman the most essential. In England, from thirty to forty is generally the age of its highest perfection.