Isaac vossius, scholar and Canon of Windsor in the seventeenth century, regretted ‘that the whole human race did not banish the plague and confusion of so many tongues and adopt an universal and self-evident system of signs and pantomimic expression’. Imago animi vultus est, says Cicero, and again, vultus … qui sermo quidam tacitus est; and finally, in the de Oratore (iii. 216), ‘every passion of the heart has its appropriate look and tone and gesture, and the whole body of man and his whole countenance and every voice he utters re-echo like the strings of a harp to the touch of every emotion in his soul’.