While, however, this admiration of fairness as a mark of beauty unquestionably prevails in England, I do not think it can be said—­as it probably can be said of the neighboring and closely allied country of France—­that the most beautiful women belong to the fairest group of the community.  In most parts of Europe the coarse and unbeautiful plebeian type tends to be very dark; in England it tends to be very fair.  England is, however, somewhat fairer generally than most parts of Europe; so that, while it may be said that a very beautiful woman in France or in Spain may belong to the blondest section of the community, a very beautiful woman in England, even though of the same degree of blondness as her Continental sister, will not belong to the extremely blonde section of the English community.  It thus comes about that when we are in northern France we find that gray eyes, a very fair but yet unfreckled complexion, brown hair, finely molded features, and highly sensitive facial expression combine to constitute a type which is more beautiful than any other we meet in France, and it belongs to the fairest section of the French population.  When we cross over to England, however, unless we go to a so-called “Celtic” district, it is hopeless to seek among the blondest section of the community for any such beautiful and refined type.  The English beautiful woman, though she may still be fair, is by no means very fair, and from the English standpoint she may even sometimes appear somewhat dark:[164] In determining what I call the index of pigmentation—­or degree of darkness of the eyes and hair—­of different groups in the National Portrait Gallery I found that the “famous beauties” (my own personal criterion of beauty not being taken into account) was somewhat nearer to the dark than to the light end of the scale.[165] If we consider, at random, individual instances of famous English beauties they are not extremely fair.  Lady Venetia Stanley, in the early seventeenth century, who became the wife of Sir Kenelm Digby, was somewhat dark, with brown hair and eyebrows.  Mrs. Overall, a little later in the same century, a Lancashire woman, the wife of the Dean of St. Paul’s, was, says Aubrey, “the greatest beauty in her time in England,” though very wanton, with “the loveliest eyes that were ever seen”; if we may trust a ballad given by Aubrey she was dark with black hair.  The Gunnings, the famous beauties of the eighteenth century, were not extremely fair, and Lady Hamilton, the most characteristic type of English beauty, had blue, brown-flecked eyes and dark chestnut hair.  Coloration is only one of the elements of beauty, though an important one.  Other things being equal, the most blonde is most beautiful; but it so happens that among the races of Great Britain the other things are very frequently not equal, and that, notwithstanding a conviction ingrained in the language, with us the fairest of women is not always the “fairest.”  So magical, however, is the effect of brilliant coloring that it serves to keep alive in popular opinion an unqualified belief in the universal European creed of the beauty of blondness.