a deep sonorous bellowing, and the whole face is quivering with
action.
In thè utmost extr em ity o r fa in there are yet other distinctions
to be marked. In agony we may frequently perceive convulsive
motions in the cheeks and lips, and in the throat, which
render all the little muscles particularly distinct: a violent tension
is upon the whole face, and the painter is constrained to mark the
anatomy strongly.
The mingling of despair and rage and bodily pain is a very
difficult study for the painter. But he must be able to express
these mingled emotions; else how shall he represent the varieties
of death which the historical painter must exhibit ? In this marginal
plate I have sketched the idea of a man who has received a
mortal blow, but who is infuriated like a beast.
Some wounds subdue at once the energies of the mind and
body: others shake the whole frame and countenance with horrible
convulsions.
The whole muscles are here exerted to the utmost, and the
strongest having the preponderance give the character. The
muscles which shut the jaw are stronger than those which open it ;
the jaw is therefore strongly clinched. We see that the muscles
of the throat too (which are also those by which the jaw is drawn
down) are in action, and the convulsion of .these muscles is to be
particularly marked. The nostril is inflated and drawn up, the
lips are open, and the angle is nearly drawn into a circle by the
simultaneous action of the following muscles in Plate II. L eva-
tores L abiorum (f . g.), Z igomatici (h .), B uccinator (g. PI.III.),
T riangularis Or is (n .), and P latysma M yoides (r .) The eyebrows
are strongly knit, and the eyeballs as if starting from their
sockets.
If a man be shot, there will be no such ferocious expression;
there is then often a strange and inexplicable nervous effect, a
trembling and sinking of the body, with faintness and oppression ;
the face and body cold, pale, and livid.
We cannot fail to observe how artfully the poets suit their
descriptions of death to that kind of interest in the person which
they have laboured to excite; and this a judicious painter will not
neglect. The tyrant falls convulsed and distorted in painful agony ;
the hero, in whose fate the reader has been made to sympathise,
expires without the horrors of death ; his fall is described with all
the images of gentle declension, where mortal languor is succeeded
by insensibility, unaccompanied by pangs and struggles.
In the Episode of Nisus and Euryalus, Virgil gives to the death
of Sulmo all the horror of violent death, the praecordia is convulsively
drawn, and the sides palpitate.