Habitual Su spic ion and J ealousy are symptoms and accompaniments
of melancholy. E nvy may be classed with these expressions.
But it is an ungenerous repining, not a momentary passion *.
* It consumes a man as a moth does a garment to be a living anatomy, a skeleton,
to be a lean and pale carcass quickened with the fiend, “ mtabescetque videndo.”
t£ La’ invidia, crudelissimo dolore di animo, per il bene altrui; fa ritirar tutti i
membri, come contraere, & offuscar le ciglia, stringere i denti, ritirar1 le labbra tor-
cersi con certa passione di sguardo quasi in atto di volere intendere & spiare i fatti
altrui,11 &c.—L om a zz. p. 130.
Suspicion is characterised by earnest attention, with a certain
timorous obliquity of the eyes. Spenser characterises suspicion as
being
--------— foul, ill-favour’d, and grim,
Under his eyebrows looking still askance,
And ever as Dissemblance laught on him,
Lowring on her with dangerous eye glance,
Showing his nature in his countenance.
His rolling eyes did never rest in place,
But walkt each where for fear of hid mischance,
Holding a lattice still before his face,
Through which he still did peep as forward he did pass.
Jealousy is marked by a more frowning and dark obliquity of
the eyes, as if he said, “ I have an eye of y o uw i t h the lowering
eyebrow there is combined a cruel expression of the lower part of
the face.
Jealousy is a fitful and unsteady passion: much of its character
is in the rapid vicissitudes from love to hate; now absent, moody,
and distressed; now courting love; now ferocious and revengeful—
it is therefore difficult to represent it in painting. In poetry only
can it truly be presented in the vivid colours of nature; and even
of poets, Shakspeare alone seems to have been equal to the task.
Sometimes it may be personified in the countenance of a mean,
pitiful, suspicious, yet oppressed creature: or again in a bold
lowering countenance, the body as if shrunk into itself like one
brooding over his state, and piecing out a tissue of trifling incidents
to abuse his judgment.
o. 2