It would seem that, in early times, the fair sex were supposed to have the greater charms, and accordingly they were styled, "Children of the Gods" by the Greeks. In "As You Like it" (act iii. sc. 5), the Shepherdess Phoebe complains of being scorned on account of her being dark--
"I have more cause to hate him than to love
him:
For what had he to do to chide at me?
He said mine eyes were black and my hair black:
And, now I am remember'd, scorned at me."
Indeed, as a writer has observed in the Saturday Review, the time was when the black-haired, black-eyed girl of fiction was as dark of soul as of tresses, while the blue-eyed maiden's character was of "Heaven's own colour." But Thackeray changed this tradition by invariably making his dark heroines nice, his fair heroines "treacherous sirens." Another item of folk-lore tells us that--
"A brown wench in face
Shows that nature gives her grace,"
and many of our country peasantry still affirm that "a too brown lass is gay and cleanly;" whilst, in accordance with an old proverbial rhyme--
"The red is wise, the brown trusty,
The pale envious, the dark lusty."
