Tasso's Clorinda falls, pierced to the heart by Tancred's brand, but dies smiling. The lines in Violenzia might partially apply to her :

Smil'st thou, poor innocent? Was death so kind to thee
That came in guise so barbarous ?

The smile that settles on the face of one killed, like her, by cold steel, is apt to be, however, of another sort than when a gunshot wound has caused death. Hood illustrates the latter case in Tylney Hall, where Raby rivets his eye on the pallid features of his brother Ringwood, "now settling into a placid smile, as frequently happens to the physiognomy where death has resulted from a gunshot wound." Bayonet gashes are said to induce such facial contortions as can be referred only to the category of Death's Own-when that grim entity grinned horribly a ghastly smile. The mortal sting of aspicks" involves no such distortion, if the look of Dryden's Cleopatra, so done to death, may be accepted in evidence :

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Th' impression of a smile left on her face

Shows she died pleased with him for whom she lived.

Hernando tells Count Julian, in Landor's dramatic poem of that name,

My father, old men say who saw him dead,
Smiled faintly through the quiet gloom that eve,
And the shroud throbbed upon his grateful breast.

And in the same poet's Giovanna of Naples we have a picture of Filippa racked, and smiling, while screams from all around filled the whole vault-men trembling, women wailing around. "To-morrow," says the judge,

"Filippa, thou must answer justice.

Release her." Still the smile was on her face.
She was released.

Death had come down and saved her.

How closes that chapter in Half a Million of Money which concerns and is entitled, "The noblest Roman of them all "? With the death of Colonna; and he dies smiling. "At that moment the dying man opened his eyes, and a rapt, radiant, wonderful smile came upon all his face, like a glory. 'Italia!' he whispered; 'Italia!'-The smile remained; but only a smile. Not the breath-not the spirit—not Giulio Colonna.”

Father Eustace, in Scott's Monastery, is described gazing on the pallid corpse of the Lady of Avenel, "from which the spirit had parted so placidly as to leave a smile upon the thin blue lips"-lips so long wasted by decay as to have parted with the last breath of animation without the slightest convulsive tremor.

Nicholas Nickleby, watching poor Smike in the slumber that preceded a deeper slumber that knows no waking, saw the closed eyes open, and a placid smile come on the pale face; for the dying boy's dreams had been tranquillising, even joyous. Soon the slumberer slumbered again, and again smiled; died smiling.

The bereaved mother in Mrs. Gaskell's Tale of Manchester Life, who cannot realise her bereavement, would fain persuade herself that her murdered Harry is pretending to be asleep "Harry is so full of fun "-and playfully defying them all to waken him. "Look! he is smiling now; he hears I have found him out. Look!" And, in truth, the lips, in the rest of death, did look (we read) as though they wore a smile; and the waving light of the unsnuffed candle almost made them seem to move. In the same writer's pathetic story of Ruth, the last chapter gives us a last look of the dead

woman's "beautiful, calm, still face, on which the last rapturous smile yet lingered, giving an ineffable look of bright serenity."

There is, remarks George Eliot, an unspeakable blending of sadness and sweetness in the smile of a face sharpened and paled by slow consumption. Such a smile as, on Mr. Tryan's face, when the end was near, pierced poor Janet's heart; why, and how, may be read in the tale of Janet's Repentance.

Lord Lytton's closing page of the New Phado details the last moments of the dying philosopher. And here is the last of all: "I heard a slight sigh, and fancying he was awake, I bent over to look into his face. The light from the window came full upon it, and I was struck-appalled, by the exceeding beauty of the smile that rested on the lips. But those lips had fallen from each other." For the life was departed; but the smile remained. So in Harold we have the hero gazing intently, lamp in hand, on the countenance of the father he has just lost: "That strange smile of the dead, common alike to innocent and guilty, had already settled on the serene lips ;" and the old man seemed sleeping in his prime. In a later fiction, from the same pen, we have an old man whose life has been smileless, dying with a smile. In yet another we have Burley dying in sleep— calmly, and without a groan; and Leonard closes tenderly the heavy lids; and, as he covers the face, the lips smile a serene farewell. And of the Susan Mainwaring of the same author we read that she "lingered dyingly for three years; and then, for the first time since William's death, she smiled -that smile remained on the face of the corpse." So with that careworn Mrs. Sherwin, in Mr. Wilkie Collins's Basil, when the servant drew the curtain aside to look if her mis

tress still slept, and saw that her eyes were closed, and that "a lovely, happy smile, such as had never once been seen on that sad face for years and years, was visible on it now."

The dead Catharine Linton of Wuthering Heights is pictured with smooth brow, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile-betokening the recurrence of her latest thoughts to pleasant early days. Isabel, the Doctor's wife, has no need of any plainer words to tell her that her husband is dead, than Charles Raymond's significant assurance, "I never saw such a smile upon a human face as I saw just now on his." The last glimpse M. Edmond About allows us of Tolla is when the whole town assembles to admire, for the last time, that flower of virtue and beauty. "Her face was calm and smiling; death had effaced all the ravages of disease: Tolla was again, for one day, the prettiest girl of Rome." Like Elaine, in the Idylls of the King,

And that clear-featured face

Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead
But fast asleep, and lay as tho' she smiled.

Or like Fidele, found by Arviragus within the cave,

Stark, as you see:

Thus smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber,
Not as death's dust, being laugh'd at.

Admired as one of the very happiest epigrams in the English language is Sir William Jones's translation of a pensée of Hafez :

On parents' knees, a naked, new-born child,
'Weeping thou sat'st, while all around thee smiled :
So live that, sinking in thy last long sleep,

Calm thou may'st smile, while all around thee weep.

Inder.