[Mrs] M. E. Haweis, ‘Smashed Birds.’

Holbein painted one with terrible truth to nature. Other old masters, equally great, painted many corpses: but they were all painted with a motive – to startle, not to tickle, the pulses. All the ideas awakened by such an image are charnelle, not joyous; and the primary object of all decoration is to give joy and pleasure, to appeal through the eye to the happiest emotions: which a corpse does not do – even when it has glass eyes. However, tenderness for innocent creatures must not trench on the primary question of what is becoming in dress; and if death can minister to beauty and joy, death will do so. It is better to have a heart in one’s body than to wear it ‘on one’s sleeve’ for every daw – and that smashed – to peck rebuke at, especially when one gains nothing in good looks. m. e. haweis.