When I look at the mouth in this picture, I am reminded of what physiognomists say, that it is the indication of our true character more than any other part of the face. Compare the young and old photographs of Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Booth, and you will see that it is within the power of anyone (no matter how plain at birth) to have at least one beautiful feature before he dies. One may not change the setting of the eyeball—because it is dependent upon bone, which cannot be altered. The setting of the eye is what gives the beauty. Those of Christine Nilsson, the singer, appeared on the stage as dark, luminous patches of velvet, for the socket cast a deep shadow; but when I met her personally, they were pale blue and ineffectual. It is the same with the nose. But the mouth has no bones. It is merely flesh under the control of many muscles. Surgeons tell me that if one opens the cheek of a man who has lived an intellectual life, it is surprising how many muscles one finds. On the other hand, the cheek of an ignorant laborer does not contain much more than a muscle for chewing, for opening and shutting the mouth, and for grinning and frowning. The muscles that give irony, humor, and sadness are not there. One of the prominent men in America, who has a beautiful mouth, has told me that when he was a boy his family objected so to it as an unsightly thing and that for many years he had the habit of covering it with his hand whenever he expressed himself, for fear of comment. The change has been within the man himself and the mouth has echoed it. One may train a plain mouth to express the beauty of the human mind which controls it. Mr. Emerson had a hole in his face as a boy, not a mouth. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the plainest man that ever lived, had a sweet, tender, one might say almost beautiful mouth, before he died. At any actors’ gathering, one can see a dozen mouths like Booth’s at twenty-five, but you will hunt a long time before finding the mouth Booth died with. The delicacy shown in a study of Edwin Booth’s face was borne out in his life. He did the most dignified thing in the world, to apologize for an act of his family against the American nation, by retiring for a period from public life after the assassination of Lincoln.