[Illustration: THE LATE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S HANDS.]
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.
[Illustration: SIR STRATFORD CANNING'S HANDS.]
Among these the hand of Lord Palmerston will stand forth most 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 to range this British galaxy against the hands of the Italian patriots, Count Cavour and Joseph Garibaldi, whose labours resulted in that master stroke of latter-day politics, the unification of Italy. Those of the former were cast separately in different positions, it being the intention of the sculptor for the right hand to rest lightly upon a column and the left to grasp a roll of parchment. Garibaldi's hand may be described as both virile and nervous.
[Illustration: HAND OF JOSEPH ARCH, M.P.]
[Illustration: HAND OF JOHN JACKSON, R.A.]
Another type of hand is exemplified in the hands of Messrs. Joseph Arch and John Burns. Both of these belong to self-made men, accustomed to hard manual labour from childhood. Their powerful ruggedness is admirably set off by the exquisite symmetry and feminine proportions of the hand of John Jackson a Royal Academician and great painter of his time. For symmetry, combined with grace, this hand is not surpassed.