FAMOUS UGLY "LADY-KILLERS."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 41, 28 May 1910, Page 9

FAMOUS UGLY "LADY-KILLERS."

"-'•■<■ woman worthy of the iuui:er ] «":•<>tc -ue 01 ill.- loveliest ladies in Lou-1 (lon society recently, "reallv cares a brass farthing whether the man' she 'honors is ft..,:; I .:—>ie or U gly. so long iis lie pos-1 sesses tnt nraae: ties of brains, phv- 1 sical strength, honor, one .ro »\ which I make such a powerful appeal to our BCX." ! And certainly history supports this I rather unconventional view, for many 01 j the plainest men of whom we have'anv record have not only won prettv aiulj well-endowed brides, but have been able; to pick and choose among the fairest, to I the confusion of their more well-favored I rivals. Y\ as there ever a .plainer wooer, we wonder, than John Wilkes, the famous champion of .popular liberties, and one of the most dissolute roues of his dav? So ugly was Wilkes that the very children ran away shrieking at sight'of him in the streets; and yet such was the spell he cast over women that "ladies of beauty and fashion vied with each other for his notice, while men of handsome exterior and all courtly graces looked enviously and impotently on." ''Give me a quarter of an hour's start," he used to boast, and I will win any lady's hand against the handsomest man in England." And he could have done it, too. There were few beauties, however fair or highly-placed, whose hands could not have been his for the asking; and in the very early 'twenties he Avon for his wife one of the loveliest heiresses of the time —a lady who refused more than one coronet to be his I bride.

" 'Beauty and the Beast,' they call us," Wilkes once said to a friend; "and really I cannot find fault with the description." Brougham, the great Lord Chancellor, was a man of most repellent ugliness, without a solitary compensating grace of speech or manner. Conscious of his un.attractiveness he shunned ladies' society as he might have shunned the plague. And what was the result? The ladies—the most lovely and aristocratic in the land —simply mobbed the "uigly lawyer," and were as .proud to ■win a smile from him as an offer of a coronet from any other man.

When anyone asked, "Where is Brougham?" the invariable answer was, "Where the ladies are thickest." And sure enough, there he was; and the more he repelled ihis fair persecutors, the more they clustered round him.

Another famous 'lady-killer" was Jean 'Paul Marat, one of the leading and most infamous figures in the French Revolution. ''Beyond any question," wrote a contemporary, "M." Marat is the ueuest man in the whole of France—and not merely ugly, but positively repulsive in person, habits, and manners." And yet in his early years he was. beyond rivalry, the most popuiar physician in Paris. His consulting-rooms were crowded daily by the loveliest women in the French capital, pushing and jostling to get a word with, or perhaps win a smile from, nim. That he turned a deaf ear and a cold shoulder to their allurements only stimulated their ardor, until their attentions became so embarrassing that at one' time he seriously meditated flight. Even when he contracted a loatnsonie skin disease, while hiding in the sewers of Paris, he 'was devotedly nursed by one of the loveliest of his 'many admirers, whom 'he "married one fine day in the presence of the sun." If possible, a still more repulsive may was Potemkin, the ex-private soldier who enslaved the fancy of Catherine the Great, and by her favor was made virtually Czar of Russia. "Dreadful and repulsive," 'was the description or one who knew him. "He has an unwieldy figure and knock-knees: is swarthy of skin, coarse in feature, and has lost one] eye. He often passes whole days in hisi room half dressed, uncomued, unwasheti, biting his nails and scratching his untidy head." And yet, says Durand. "'the Empress is quite crazy over him. as is proved -by her .passionate letters, in which she addresses him as : mv Lord.' 'my King,' 'my inestimable Treasure.'" But perhaps the most remarkable of all these cases of woman's infatuation for ugly men was that of W. Hamilton, a Scotsman of a century and a-half ago! Hamilton was not only prenaturaTly ugly, but he was terribly deformed. "His legs," we are told, "we're drawn up to his ears, his arms were twisted backwards, and almost every member was out of joint."

.In spite of these terrible physical drawbacks Hamilton easily outstripped all the gallants in his district in favor of the ladies. "He might have married any of them for the asking—indeed, it is said several of them actually asked him," says a chronicler. But he remained proof against all their wiles until after his eightieth birthday, and then he married a. girl of twenty, himself being car . ried to the altar on men's shoulders.