Helen in her old age, looking at herself in a mirror, is a subject which old sonneteers were fond of borrowing from the Greek Anthology. Young Ladies! you who have sate to Sir Thomas, or any artist of his school, I will tell you how your portraits may be rendered more useful monitors to you in your progress through life than the mirror was to Helen, and how you may derive more satisfaction from them when you are grown old. Without supposing that you actually “called up a look,” for the painter's use, I may be certain that none of you during the times of sitting permitted any feeling of ill humour to cast a shade over your countenance; and that if you were not conscious of endeavouring to put on your best looks for the occasion, the painter was desirous of catching them, and would catch the best he could. The most thoughtless of you need not be told that you cannot retain the charms of youthful beauty; but you may retain the charm of an amiable expression through life: Never allow yourselves to be seen with a worse than you wore for the painter! Whenever you feel ill-tempered, remember that you look ugly; and be assured that every emotion of fretfulness, of ill-humour, of anger, of irritability, of impatience, of pride, haughtiness, envy, or malice, any unkind, any uncharitable, any ungenerous feeling, lessens the likeness to your picture, and not only deforms you while it lasts, but leaves its trace behind; for the effect of the passions upon the face is more rapid and more certain than that of time. “His counsel,” says Gwillim the Pursuivant, “was very behoveful, who advised all gentlewomen often to look on glasses, that so, if they saw themselves beautiful, they might be stirred up to make their minds as fair by virtue as their faces were by nature; but if deformed, they might make amends for their outward deformity, with their intern pulchritude and gracious qualities. And those that are proud of their beauty should consider that their own hue is as brittle as the glass wherein they see it; and that they carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin which one day will be loathsome to be looked on.” The conclusion of this passage accorded not with the Doctor's feelings. He thought that whatever tended to connect frightful and loathsome associations with the solemn and wholesome contemplation of mortality, ought to be avoided as injudicious and injurious. So too with regard to age: if it is dark and unlovely “the fault,” he used to say, “is generally our own; Nature may indeed make it an object of compassion, but not of dislike, unless we ourselves render it so. It is not of necessity that we grow ugly as well as old.” Donne says No spring, nor summer's beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face;