presume that a genuine proboscis was of rare occurrence. Many of the lampoons and jokes circulated by the wits of Athens, are as extravagant as the noses themselves, and enough has been preserved to fill a horse's nose-bag. Let the following, from the Anthology, suffice as a sample : "Dick cannot wipe his nostrils if he pleases, (30 long his nose is, and his arms so short;) Nor ever cries God bless me !' when he sneezes ; He cannot hear so distant a report." Or this, which is attributed to the Emperor Trajan :- Would make an excellent sun-dial." Many of these epigrams were derived by the Greeks from the Oriental Facetiæ; and, if we could trace the pedigree of a joke, which, even at some dinner parties, sets the table in a roar, we should probably hunt it back to the symposia of Athens, and the festive halls of Bagdad. It must be confessed that, in several of these instances, if the wit be old, it is very little of its age; for Hierocles, like his successor, Joe Miller, seems now and then to have thought it a good joke to put in a bad one. Ovid, it is well known, derived his sobriquet of Naso, from the undue magnitude of that appendage, though it did not deter him from aspiring to the affections of Julia, the daughter of Augustus. But it is not, perhaps, so generally known, that the cry of "Nosey!" issuing from the gallery of the play-house, when its inmates are musically inclined, is the nickname, which has long survived a former leader of the band, to whom nature had been unsparingly bountiful in that prominent feature. Though a roomy nose may afford a good handle for ridicule, there are cases in which a certain magnificence and G. 28. superabundance of that feature, if not abstractedly becoming, has, at least, something appropriate in its redundancy, according well with the characteristics of its wearer. It has its advantages as well as disadvantages, A man of any spirit is compelled to take cognizance of offences committed under his very nose, but with such a promontory as we have been describing, they may come within the strict letter of the phrase, and yet be far enough removed to afford him a good plea for protesting that they escaped his observation. He is not bound to see within his nose, much less beyond it. Should a quarrel, however, become inevitable, the very construction of this member compels him to meet his adversary half-way. Nothing could reconcile us to a bulbous excrescence of this inflated description, if we saw it appended to a poor little insignificant creature, giving him the appearance of the Toucan; and suggesting the idea of being tied to his own nose to prevent his straying. But suppose the case of a burly, jovial, corpulent alderman, standing behind such an appendage, with all its indorsements, riders, addenda, extra-parochial appurtenances, and Taliacotian supplements, like a sow with her whole litter of pigs, or, to speak more respectfully, like a venerable old abbey, with all its projecting chapels, oratories, refectories, and abutments; and it will seem to dilate itself before its wearer with an air of portly and appropriate companionship. I speak not here of a simple bottle-nose, but one of a thousand bottles, a polypetalous enormity, whose blushing honours, as becoming to it as the stars, crosses, and ribands of a successful general, are trophies of past victories, the colours won in tavern campaigns. They recall to us the clatter of knives, the slaughter of turtle, the shedding of claret, the deglutition of magnums. Esurient and bibulous reminiscences ooze from its surface, and each protuberance is historical. One is the record of a Pittclub dinner, another of a corporation feast, a third commemorates a tipsy carousal, in support of religion and social order; others attest their owners' civic career, "until, at last, he devoured his way to the Lord Mayor's mansion, as a mouse in a cheese makes a large house for himself by continually eating" and the whole pendulus mass, as if it heard the striking up of the band at a public dinner on the entrance of the viands, actually seems to wag to the tune of "O, the roast beef of Old England!" As there are many who prefer the arch of the old bridges to the straight line of the Waterloo, so there are critics who extend the same taste to the bridge of the nose, deeming the Roman handsomer than the Grecian; a feeling which may probably be traced to association. A medallist, whose coins of the Roman emperors generally exhibit the convex projection, conceives it expressive of grandeur, majesty, and military pre-eminence; while a collector of Greek vases will limit his idea of beauty to the straight line depictured on his favourite antiques. The Roman form unquestionably has its beauties; its outline is bold, flowing, and dignified; it looks as if nature's own hand had fashioned it for one of her noble varieties; but the term has become a misnomer; it is no longer applicable to the inhabitants of the eternal city, whose nasal bridges seem to have subsided with the decline and fall of their empire. While we are upon the subject of large noses, we must not forget that of the Jews, which has length and breadth in abundance, but is too often so ponderous, ungraceful, and shapeless, as to discard every idea of dignity, and to impart to the countenance a character of burlesque and ugly disproportion. It is not one of nature's primitive forms, but a degeneracy produced by perpetual intermarriages of the same race during successive ages. It is a deformity, and comes therefore, more properly, under the head of nosology. Let it not, however, be imagined, that all our attention is to be lavished upon these folio noses; the duodecimos and Elzevirs have done execution in the days that are gone, and shall pass away from our memories like the forms of last year's clouds! Can we forget "Le petit nez retroussé" of Marmontel's heroine, which captivated a sultan, and overturned the laws of an empire? Was not the downfall of another empire, as recorded in the immortal work of Gibbon, written under a nose of the very snubbiest construction? So concave and intangible was it, that when his face was submitted to the touch of a blind old French lady, who used to judge of her acquaintance by feeling their features, she slapt it, exclaiming, away, this is a nasty joke." Wilkes, equally unfortunate in this respect, and remarkably ugly besides, used to maintain that, in the estimation of society, a handsome man had only half an hour's start of him, as, within that period he would recover by his conversation what he had lost by his looks. Perhaps the most insurmountable objection to the pug or cocked-up nose, is the flippant, distasteful, or contemptuous expression it conveys, such as that of the late William Pitt, for instance. To turn up our noses, is a colloquialism for disdain; and even those of the ancient Romans, inflexible as they appear, could curl themselves up in the fastidiousness of concealed derision. Horace talks of sneers suspended, naso adunco." It cannot be denied, that those who have been snubbed by nature, not unfrequently look as if they were anxious to take their revenge by snubbing others. As a friend to noses of all denominations, I must here enter my solemn protest against a barbarous abuse to which they are too often subjected, by converting them into dust-holes and soot-bags, under the fashionable pretext of taking snuff; an abomination for which Sir Walter Raleigh is responsible, and which ought to have been included in his impeachment. When some Sir Plume of amber snuff-box justly vain," after gently tapping its top with a look of diplomatic complacency, embraces a modicum of its contents with his finger and thumb, curves round his hand, so as to display the brilliant on his little finger, and commits the high-dried pulvilio to the air, so that nothing but its impalpable aroma ascends into his nose, we may smile at the custom as a harmless and ungraceful foppery; but when a filthy, clammy compost is perpetually thrust up the nostrils, with a voracious pig-like snort, is a practice as disgusting to the beholders, as I "believe it to be injurious to the offender. The nose is the emunctory of the brain, and when its functions are impeded, the whole system of the head becomes deranged. A professed snuff-taker is generally recognizable by his total loss of the sense of smelling-by his pale, sodden complexion -and by that defective modulation of the voice called talking through the nose, though it is in fact an inability so to talk, from the partial or total stoppage of the passage. Not being provided with an ounce of civet, I would not suffer my imagination to wallow in all the revolting concomitants of this dirty trick; but I cannot refrain from an extract, by which we may form some idea of the time consumed in its performance. 'Every snuff-taker," says Lord Stanhope, "at a moderate computation, takes one pinch in ten minutes. Every pinch, with the agreeable ceremony of 66 blowing and wiping the nose, and other incidental circumstances, consumes a minute and a half. One minute and a half, out of every ten, allowing sixteen hours to a snuff-taking day, amounts to two hours and twenty-four minutes out of every natural day, or one day out of every ten. One day out of every ten amounts to thirty-six days and a half in a year, Hence, if we suppose the practice to be persisted in forty years, two entire years of the snuff-taker's life will be dedicated to tickling his nose, and two more to blowing it." Taken medicinally, or as a simple sternutatory, it may be excused; but the moment your snuff is not to be sneezed at, you are the slave of a habit which literally makes you grovel in the dust; your snuff-box has seized you as St. Dunstan did the Devil, and, if the red hot pincers, with which he performed the feat, could occasionally start up from an Ormskirk snuff-box, it might have a salutary effect in checking this nasty propensity among our real and pseudo fashionables. It was my intention to have extended this dissertation to a considerable length, but I apprehend that your readers will begin to think I have led them by the nose quite long enough; and lest you yourself, Mr. Editor, should suspect that I am making a handle of the subject, merely that you may pay through the nose for my communication, I shall conclude at once with a Sonnet to my own, Nose. O Nose! thou rudder in my face's centre, Guard him from all disgrace and misadventure, So shalt thou quit the city's stench and smoke, H. |