This lessens, at any rate, the difficulty of description. The mediæval beauty was _always_ golden-haired, either naturally or by the aid of art. Her hair was very fine, rippling in long curves above a fair broad forehead. One of her distinctive charms was the large space between the brows, the “plaisant entr’euil” so often sung of early poets; very few things seemed more hideous to our forefathers than shaggy eyebrows meeting in the middle. It was also a great disadvantage for the eyebrows to be fair. They should be several shades darker than the hair, narrow, pencilled, delicately arched; Burns’-- “Eyebrows of a darker hue Bewitchingly o’erarching.” Eyes, not blue, but “grey as glass,” “plus vairs que cristal,” not over-large, somewhat deeply set, and always bright, keen, and shining as a falcon’s. Below these brilliant eyes, a small straight nose, rather long than short, but above all “traitis”--that is to say, neat and straight--divided two oval cheeks, with dimples that appear at the bidding of a smile. A fresh, faint pink-and-white colour, like the first apple-blossom, must flourish in these little cheeks. The lips are much redder, slightly pursed over the tiny pearly teeth; “la bouche petite et grossette,” says the prosaic _Roman de la Rose_; but Ulrich von Lichtenstein expressed his meaning better in his “kleinvelhitzerôter munt,” his “little, very fire-red mouth;” or the author of _Guillaume le Faucon_, who likens his heroine’s lips to a scarlet poppy-bud: “Tant estoit vermeille et close.” Sometimes the small mouth was only half shut, as if about to speak: “Les lèvres jointes en itel guise C’un poi i lessa ouverture Selonc réson et par mesure,” says the author of _Narcisse_.[67] The cleft chin and the ears must be small and round and white, above a long neck, with a full white throat. The fairness of this throat, its delicacy and transparence, was the _sine quâ non_ of feminine loveliness. “When she drank red wine, one saw the rosy fluid through her throat,” say the poets. The beauty of the Middle Ages was invariably slender, slim, and round as a willow-wand. The shoulders are small, the whole figure “greslette et alignie”; long-drawn out in slenderness, with slim, round, long limbs, and slim, round, long fingers, that show no joints, and terminate in trim, shining nails, cut very close. The bust is high, with neat, round, well-divided breasts, and a slim, round waist. When Eustache Deschamps, in his 960th Ballad, sings the charms of a lady quite correctly like this portrait, he ends with saying: “Mais sur toutes portez bien vos habiz Plus que nulle dame ne damoiselle Qui soit vivante en terre n’en paÿs.”[68] Poets in every century have laid great store by that “something i’ the gait Gars ony dress look weel.” The _Roman de la Rose_, that manual of the fourteenth century, devotes a score or so of verses to this doctrine of deportment.