The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-04-07

 the great German expert. The slate tab let is 79-100 of a meter long and 5l-100 of d meter wide. The figure of Cleopatra which is only designed to the waist, is lifesize. painted on or against dark green background, representing a cur tain. The right forearm is strongly fore shortened, and the right hand which will be noticed for the elegance of it's contour, holds loosely some folds of the chiton, which have been plucked aside from tha breast to bare it to the asp.
 There is one remarkable feature of the painting. 1t is the dark green, yellow spotted snake which, applied to the breast with the raised left hand, has wound itself around the forearm and inserted it's teeth into the left breast, from which some drops of blood ooze out
 Of what Cleopatra's nose and hair were really like this gives the first accurate idea. Her hair is thick. long and blonde; it is worn on the state occasion of death for which she decked herself out in her handsomest jewels-powdered profusely with gold dust, and is laid about the head in artistic tresses making moder- ate-sized knot, on the top, falling loosely over the neck and braided once about the throat, in front of which it is tied
 The eyes of Cleopatra are shown to be of a deep-blue. almost black. changing subtly to the darker tint in the excite ment of pain or pleasure Rider flag gard is, perhaps, the most indefatigable living student of Cleopatra's personality. He has drawn a pen-plcture of her, after q careful investigation of all the extant portraitures. He says of her eyes Dark they were, dark as night; but when the light found them, they grew blue even as the sky grows blue before the blushing of the dawn"
 "Cleopatra asleep he describes almost aerr ba cta aIv of the encaustic tile, stretched on her couch of ivory, beneath web of gold and filmy silk, some happy hour when suicide was yet far from her thoughts. There she lay-the fairest thing that ever man saw-fairer than a dream, and all about her flowed the web of her dark hair. One white rounded arm made pillow for her head, one hung downward to the ground. Her rich lips were parted in smile, showing the ivory of her teeth; and hef rosy limbs were draped in so thin robe of the silk of Cos, held about her by jeweled girdle so that the white gleam of flesh shone through it.'
 But in the Haggard. pen picture the hair is dark. If the Cleopatra of the tile is the Queen of Egypt whose counterfeit presentment Augustus ordered to be car ried back to Rome in his triumph; then Haggard Is wrong, and the raven con- bination of blue-black eyes and locks as ta why as the lions mane,' must be the accredited one.
 And her nose. Eyes, hair and nose were the ancients test of female lovlness. On the neck and throat and chin Venus levied toll to her wilder fancies. The eyes and hair of the most celebrated women of royal annals are known now to have been unexceptionable. But what of her nose?
 In his Nile Notes" Bayard Taylor breaks out into very lively and poetic ,-I. tomb on the Upper Nile of an effigy of Cleopatra. which showed her in all her regal splendor, but with pug nose. "Ye Gods, Cleopatra with pug nose,' was an exclamation almost any romantic person might have made under the circumstances. But 1t is an unnecessary lament. There is no longer reason to doubt the accuracy of at least four pictures of Egypt" each of which shows her nose to have been long and slightly aequline, curving at the tips with a fiery, voluptuous turn inward, which is as rare in won1ankind as 1t is said to have been fascinating in her.
 Dr. Schooner, the first of German au- thorities, says, on this point: Whether a cut carnelian of the museum in the Col legio Romano really represents Cleopatra is uncertain The delicacy of the face, joined with a long, straight nose, which somewhat hangs down, as also the sceptre over the left shoulder, renders it prob able"
 John Sartain writes of her: "It is on record that the end of her nose dipped, or hooked, slightly downward It seems indisputabe therefore that 1t was the very reverse of pug" and instead of be- ing "uptited, like the petal of a fiower,' was curved in like the nostrils of the charger who 'sniffs the battle from afar" In vivid allegorical figure he has drawn of Cleopatra as q Sphinx, Sartain repre- sents two salient characteristics of her face. One was the nose curved in and oppressive; the other, the throat and bust curved out and defiant; both in the full outline of youth and strength for Age could not wlther her nor custom stale"
 At the great temple at Dendera is a majestic carving of Cleopatra as Isis Here may be plainly seen the voluptuous, daring, regal audacity. the supreme self ishness of the throat and lips and nostrils which the Sphnx figure portrays so re- markedly. On the head rest the mystical horns of the Sacred Cow, and the tawny locks are covered by the omnipresent folded wings which seem almost to have covered Egypt itself so universal Is their subtle suggestiveness.
 That picture of opatra-painted to Augustus order-was made immediately after her death, history shows. That it
  either the original or a replica, is con cusively proven. So even if that picture were shown to have been made by some famous Greek artist who executed 1t in the Greek style, and with Greek sugges- tions apparently wanting in the outline at Dendera what does 1t all prove?
 Nothing. Cleopatra was Greek, by de- scent In intellect and audacity, quite as surely as she was Egyptian by birth bringing up and tastes. The full face may present the Greek quite as clearly as the profile does the Egyptian characteristics.
 The face on the Cleopatra coin In the British museum is strikingly like that of the Dendera outline. Cold and cruel is the repose depicted in the mouth and eyes. Yet no colder, no more cruel, than a mountani lake shut in by snowy cliffs, chilled with the dignity of rest and frozen in the embrace of dark, treacherous mountains Once the sun melts their fet- ters and clothes them in a soft haze of green and warns their feet, and smiles into the waters. how they smile back and glow with golden light and flush with the verdue of the heights and the blue of the skies and the Celestial rosy red Loves proper hue"-of the voluptuous sunset. What a change there is, yet all is the same! So with the two Cleopatras --one purified by the death agony. the other steeped to the lips in pleasure, power and pridel
 The British museum medal is said to be confirmed to a striking degree in it's ex- pression by not dissmilar medal found by the late Lieutenant Gorringe under one of the great brass crabs that sup ported in it's Egyptian home the Obelisk which is the pride of Central Park. New