UGLY MEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 255, 27 October 1937, Page 12

UGLY MEN.

The illustrious men in history who have kindled in women's hearts inextinguishable passione have been, as a rule, plain. Julius Caesar was far from handsome. He had a dietemper in hie head, Plutarch tells us, and was subject to epilepsy. Yet, when a mere stripling, before his fame in Rome, girle of his own age sighed for him, and mature women longed for his love. Sir Philip Sidney, one of the famous knights of Elizabethan chivalry, whom women of all ages adored, was plain to a degree jof ugliness. He fascinated by his mind, not his person. Paul Scarron, the comic poet, renowned in his day, dazzled the imaginations and controlled the sensibilities of some of the most beautiful ' jmen of France during the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louie XIV. Nature had been miserly to him as respects hie person, even before disease had made him a wretched cripple. Even then he had no trouble in obtaining the love of the young and lovely woman who, ae Madame de Maintenon, subsequently *?;;!>jugated the most fastidious and fickle of French kinge.

Baron Friederich Von der Trenck was a great favourite; and yet he wae cheated of attractive features, owing all his emotional success, as he once wrote, to his uncompromising ugliness 1

There is no name for the 'cat in Hebrew, or any mention of it in the Bible; nor does it exist on the Babylonian and Assyrian monument*.