HUMAN ANIMALITY.

“His intellect is not replenished—he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.”

Shakspeare.

The chances of my visiting list brought to my boudoir this morning two such pretty creatures, male and female, so brilliant and so bird-like, that I thought they had escaped from a group of tropical specimens that stood in a corner of the room, and which they very much resembled. There was the bill, and the beak, and the bright plumage, and elegant form; and not one sound of melody in their discordant voices—not one idea in their vacant heads: and so they chirped, and chattered, without ceasing, with all the emulative noise and volubility of bores and birds. They had neither of them met before; and, mutually excited and mutually pleased, they so ruffled and fluttered their feathers at each other, that I really longed to catch both, to shut them up together in the same cage, and add them to my collection of curiosities, natural, and unnatural.

These two creatures can never have any conduct, for they are evidently and organically deficient in their judgment; those bird-shaped heads, with their disproportioned beaks, and falling-in of the lower part of the facial structure, always produce self willed folly—the obstinacy which arises from the inability to receive an impression. One of my pretty visitors has recently and strongly evinced this species of imperturbability. Persons who resemble brute animals, are generally deficient in intellect. Men who have the low shallow forehead of the bull-dog will prefer Mendoza to Coke upon Littleton; and send them as you may to the bar or to the pulpit, they will live and die prize-fighters—if not in the ring at Hockley, at least in the circle of their friends and acquaintance, to whom their pugnacity will be a perpetual annoyance.

Men who resemble monkeys (and I know several who do), who have small close meeting eyes, are generally rogues, or at least extremely cunning; but it is the cunning which is without wisdom—precisely the species of intelligence ascribed to the amusing animal they resemble. Men, who resemble horses, may succeed by force of volition in particular careers, where will is more requisite, than development of intellect; but the horse-faced gentleman could never truly answer in the affirmative to poor Maturin’s habitual question, on a first introduction—“Are you intellectual?”

I believe it is an allowed fact in physics, that the extreme facial development, which goes to the physiognomy of our horse-faced friends, is always at the expense of the brain; for the horse is a most stupid animal, thorough-breed him as you may. Confide in your dog, your cat, your mule, your ass, (a most misrepresented animal, by the by,) but beware of your horse! Train, break, educate, and harness him, he is never to be trusted. If I had the task allotted me of selecting those to whom the destiny of a nation was to be committed, I should never choose men who bore an obvious resemblance to any of the race of brute animals: they must be morally defective somehow or other. The head of a bird is not only a moral defect, but a positive animal deformity. A horse’s head is not a deformity, but it is evidently a very inferior organization. Before the representatives of the people are chosen by the people, who themselves have been likened, by a great statesman and philosopher, to pigs, and called a swinish multitude, I would have them examined by the suffrages of a committee of eminent physiologists, anatomists, physicians, and surgeons.

Well, all this may be nonsense; but it is my sense: tale, quale, I give it as I have it. “A homely thing, Sir, but a thing of my own,” as Touchstone says; and so, there it is!