Whenever I return to England from abroad, which is often, a very troubling question comes insistently into mind: why are the people here so ugly?
I do not mean by this that I think all foreigners are handsome or beautiful, far from it. One of the tricks that Stepmother Nature has played on humanity is to give it an idea of beauty in its own kind, and then deny the thing itself to so large a proportion of the race.
Still, there is something special about English ugliness. It is not of the face alone, but of the soul. As Sir Thomas Browne put it (and he must have known, because he was a doctor): ‘For there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read ABC may read our natures.’
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