The ant-eater is not a prepossessing being. Anybody who had never before seen or heard of him would readily believe him to be an inhabitant of the moon. He looks the sort of animal one would invent in a nightmare; his comparatively sober colours and his bushy tail save him from being an absolute unearthly horror. Conceive, if you can, a pink ant-eater with blue spots and a forked tail!
Neither is the ant-eater very wise; nothing with so much tongue is very wise; and the ant-eater uses up so much of its head-stuff on its nose that nothing is left for the brain. The ant-eater never cuts his wisdom teeth, because he never has any teeth at all. Really the ant-eater scarcely seems a respectable character considered altogether. An animal with more than a foot of slender nose, expressly used for poking into other people's concerns (the ants'), an immeasurable tongue, no use for a tooth-brush, and an irregular longing for cockroaches for lunch--well, _is_ such an animal quite respectable? Would you, for instance, tolerate him in your club?
The only fairly respectable member of the Dasypidæ is the armadillo--unless you count the sloth's scientific indolence a claim to respectability; I rather think it is. But none of the Dasypidæ are clever--not one. They are all in the lowest form of the mammalian school, and whenever one is not at the bottom of the form it is because another already occupies the place. You will commonly find them placed last of the mammalia in the first book of natural history you look at.
The art of making-up is one which every actor cultivates most assiduously. He can convey as much by his countenance as he can by the words which so glibly roll off his tongue. An extra wrinkle about the eye will whisper of anything between a diabolical murder and a hungry interior; a highly-coloured nose may either betray a tendency to a too frequent falling down in adoration of Bacchus, or the excessive colour may act as a silent reminder of a "cobd it de head" and the advisability of an immediate application of a small bottle of glycerine. All well and good. But some of our actors are beginning to play pranks with their faces, and are forgetting that they possess a canvas which needs as delicate touching with the colours as that on the easel of a Royal Academician. There is a positive danger of "the Villain at the Vic" making a successful re-appearance again--that estimable individual whose corkscrew curls were as black as his deeds; whose every glance told that "ber-lud, ber-lud, nothing but ber-lud, and let it be cer-r-rimson at that, my lor-rd!" would satisfy. You remember him. But it is not intended that these pages should either by word from pen or picture from pencil libel the face of any actor breathing. It is only desirable that the disciples of Thespis should be warned against overdoing their stage faces. There is really no need for it. They are not at Sadler's Wells to-day.