Her complexions indeed! I could make as good a complexion for myself (we old women are painters too, in our way, Blyth).

Don't tell me about her complexion--it's her eyes! her incomparable blue eyes, which would have driven the young men of _my_ time mad--mad, I give you my word of honor! Not a gentleman, sir, in my youthful days--and they _were_ gentlemen then--but would have been too happy to run away with her for her eyes alone; and what's more, to have shot any man who said as much as 'Stop him!' Complexion, indeed, Mr.Gimble?
I'll complexion you, next time I find my way into your picture-gallery! Take a pinch of snuff, Blyth; and never repeat nonsense in my hearing again." There was Mr.Bullivant, the enthusiastic young sculptor, with the mangy flow of flaxen hair, and the plump, waxy face, who wrote poetry, and showed, by various sonnets, that he again differed completely about the young lady from the Dowager Countess of Brambledown and Mr.Gimble.

This gentleman sang fluently, on paper--using, by the way, a professional epithet--about her "chiselled mouth", "Which breathed of rapture and the balmy South." He expatiated on "Her sweet lips smiling at her dimpled chin, Whose wealth of kisses gods might long to win--" and much more to the same maudlin effect.

In plain prose, the ardent Bullivant was all for the lower part of the young lady's face, and actually worried her, and Mr.Blyth, and everybody in the house, until he got leave to take a cast of it.
Lastly, there was Mrs.Blyth's father; a meek old gentleman, with a continual cold in the head; who lived on marvelously to the utmost verge of human existence--as very poor men, with very large families, who would be much better out of this world than in it, very often do.
There was this low-speaking, mildly-infirm, and perpetually-snuffling engraver, who, on being asked to mention what he most admired in her, answered that he thought it was her hair, "which was of such a nice light brown color; or, perhaps, it might be the pleasant way in which she carried her head, or, perhaps, her shoulders--or, perhaps, her head _and_ shoulders, both together.

Not that his opinion was good for much in tasty matters of this kind, for which reason he begged to apologize for expressing it at all." In speaking thus of his opinion, the worthy engraver surely depreciated himself most unjustly: for, if the father of eight daughters cannot succeed in learning (philoprogenitively speaking) to be a good judge of women, what man can?
However, there was one point on which Mr.Gimble, Lady Brambledown, Mr.
Bullivant, Mrs.Blyth's father, and hosts of friends besides, were all agreed, without one discordant exception.
They unanimously asserted that the young lady's face was the nearest living approach they had ever seen to that immortal "Madonna" face, which has for ever associated the idea of beauty with the name of RAPHAEL.