It will not be out of place to compare it with the hands of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, which were cast posthumously. Scarcely anything could be more antagonistic. The nervous personality of Manning is wanting here. The hands of the Archbishop seem more to belong to the order of the benevolent Bishop Myriel than to that of the enthusiast and ascetic.
Plenty of opportunity to study the hands of statesmen is afforded in those of Lord Palmerston, Count Cavour, Sir Stratford Canning, and Lord Melbourne. The fallacy of attaching special qualities to any distinctive trait in the hand of an eminent person is most readily discernible here. One should avoid à posteriori reasoning. It would be the same for a physiognomist to argue a man a statesman from a facial resemblance to Mr. Gladstone, or that he is fit to write tragedies because he owns the exact facial proportions of Sardou.
Among these the hand of Lord Palmerston will stand forth mnost prominently to the reader. Its characteristics are, on the whole, sufficiently obvious, in the appended cast, to be thought accentuated. It might not unprofitably be noted in connection with those of Stratford Canning, Viscount de Redcliffe (for fifty years British Ambassador in India), whose statue by Boehm, with Tennyson's famous epitaph:
Thou third great Canning, stand among our best
And noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased,
Here, silent in our Minster of the West,
Who wert the voice of England in the East!
is in a nave of the Abbey. With these should be joined the hand of Viscount Melbourne, the predecessor of Sir Robert Peel in the Premiership, and the great statesman after whom the city of Melbourne was named, in order
