mountains are stamped upon the earth, or flit across it, like clouds across a summer sky.

And if we are to look in the face for the strongest, highest, and most perfect expression of character, even in the face of a beast, there must be some feature of the face on which it is preeminently written. That feature, to keep the reader in suspense no longer, is THE NOSE! I can imagine looks of incredulity, but it is "as plain as the nose on your face." The nose is the central feature, and the face would not be a face without it. Imagine its absence! How would a man look without a nose? He may lose legs, arms, eyes, and ears, and may conceal forehead, mouth, and chin, yet, with a decent nose, pass muster. Even the smallest, most insignificant, and most unshapely nose, is infinitely better than none. Must not that be the most important feature whose absence produces the most hideous deformity? And must not a feature be significant of character in proportion to its importance? Ergo-et cetera.

When I had read Lavater's fragment on noses, and looked at his illustrations in the library of the British Museum, I took a walk among the antiquities to see what the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans thought about the matter; and I found that gods and demi-gods, kings and heroes, have all noble and beautiful noses. An inch on a man's nose would be, in a majority of cases, a striking elongation; but the antique sculptors, when they had modelled the noblest and most symmetrical human face, full of strength and dignity, power and majesty, the face of an ideal monarch or hero, had only to add a few lines to the length of the nose, and the face becomes that of a god. So the great painters, in the revival of art in Europe, when they have gathered all beauty into the countenances of holy personages, have made their faces divine by the idealisation of this single feature. Look, for example, at the "Ecce Homo" of Correggio, or at the Madonnas of Raphael. I think that if there were any doubt whether a Greek statue were intended for a deity or a mortal, it could always be settled by measuring the nose. There are striking proofs of the accuracy of the ancient sculptors in their representations of mortals. The Hebrews on the slabs from Nineveh might have been copied from photographs taken at the Royal Exchange. The Negroes of the Egyptian frescoes are the veritable Sambos of a plantation in Brazil or Alabama. And, please to observe, in each case the nose is the distinguishing feature. It was from observation, then, that they gave their great men great noses; great, I mean, in the true elements and signs of greatness. Naturally they expanded these when they attempted the representation of divine attributes.

How beautiful are the noses on the Egyptian sculptures! You may spend hours in studying them on covers of porphyry sarcophagi. But if you would have all the majesty of a nose, look at the Greek Jupiter; or if all the masculine beauty, study the Apollo. The bust of Homer may be of doubtful authenticity as a portrait, but what a nose! You ask, perhaps, what that signifies if it is not a portrait. It shows us, my

friend, what the observation of the Greek sculptors had taught them to consider a suitable nose for a Homer; and that is no slight consideration. If painters and sculptors were to represent heroic and beautiful ideals with mean and grotesque noses, we should think them worthy of a lunatic asylum; and in this verdict we concede all that Lavater has claimed.

Look again at the busts of Pythagoras and Plato. What majesty! what wisdom! and what noses! One nose there was in ancient Greece, which is, it must be confessed, a hard nut for Lavater - the conspicuous pug of Socrates. But we have the testimony of the philosopher himself, that his wisdom and virtues were a triumph of constant effort over his natural dispositions. And such a pug as we see portrayed upon the mug of the philosopher betokens not a little energy, and that it is exceptional, proving a rule, is shown by the fact that every body is astonished that such a man should have such a nose.

If you turn to the left on first entering the British Museum, you pass into a gallery of Roman portrait busts. Several are of doubtful or unknown personages, and a number, I am sorry to observe, have lost their noses by the accidents of fifteen or twenty centuries; but there are the busts, and noses entire, and to all appearance faithfully accurate, of Julius Cæsar, Augustus, Nero, Domitian, Antoninus, Caligula, and a few imperial ladies. Suppose one were to transpose the two noses of Nero and Julius Cæsar. Each face would be made monstrous. Nero's is monstrous as it is. He has been called handsome, but his nose is that of a demon of cruelty and lust. And this notion of a transposition of noses reminds me that the change of this one feature is all that is necessary for the most effectual disguise. A false nose is as delusive as an entire mask. A false eye must be matched in colour with the true one, or there is a disagreeable contrast; but a man who has the misfortune to require a false nose must get one in harmony with his whole face, and one which is therefore a true expression of his character, or the effect will be very unpleasant. No two faces are alike; no two noses will suit the same face; and none but a nose of wax will suit two faces. "Nose of wax!" A pliable character is one whose nose may be moulded to any contour.

The more the reader studies this remarkable feature of the "human face divine”—and a noseless face would have no divinity-the more will he appreciate its importance. Noses mark the peculiarities of races, and the gradations of society. The noses of the Australians, the Esquimaux, and the Negroes-broad, flat, and weak-mark their mental and moral characteristics. The striking differences between the African Negro and the North-American Indian are sculptured on their noses. In the mingled races and different classes of our own country we find the largest variety, and every where, if we but examine, the nose is the index of class as well as of character. The noses of the aristocracy are not those of the democracy; and how could one more appropriately express his contempt for an inferior than by turning up his nose at him? Do we

see the same kind of noses at the east end of the town as at the west? in the stalls and the dress-circle of the Opera, and in the sixpenny pit and threepenny gallery of the minor theatre? at a prize-fight and a fashionable evening-party? In smaller towns, where social grades are brought nearer together, and can be more readily compared and examined, the contrast is very remarkable. Dublin, for example, presents us with a perfect gamut of noses, from the most diminutive small potato pug to the symmetrical Grecian and haughty Roman. The pug in rags drives along in a picturesque donkey-cart; the elegant Grecian, in its statuesque beauty, glides past on the side-walk; the Roman reclines in a carriage, whose panels exhibit the insignia of ancient rank and dominion. There are Irish faces of children and of savages, simply good or fearfully bad, and there are also those of the highest culture and refinement. Beauty, genius, valour, and nobility have their home in the sad sister island; but all these find their opposites, often in a strange proximity.

If you look at the progress of the individual life, the contour of the nose marks all its stages. Who ever saw a baby with a Roman or aquiline nose, or even a Grecian? The baby-nose is a little snub, the nose of weakness and undevelopment. The child's nose keeps its inward curve; in youth it straightens; and then comes, in certain characters and races, the bold outward curve of the aquiline or the stronger prominence of the Roman. It may stop at any point in this march of progress, and present a case of arrested development. And we all feel instinctively that a certain shaped nose is the proper index of a certain character. Who expects to see a soubrette on the stage with an aristocratic nose? Un nez retroussé is her proper type. The low comedian, if not happily favoured by nature, must call in the aid of a touch of vermilion. A suitable nose is as necessary as a red wig. But the hero of the play must have a proper nose; and if the man who plays romantic robbers has one prominent enough, and like an eagle's beak, it will be some extra shillings in his weekly salary.

When I had pondered Lavater, and surveyed antiquities in stone and bronze, frescoes and vases, I looked into the collections of portraits of distinguished men, looking especially, as we always do and must look, at the most prominent feature. What wonderful noses they have! There was not such a nose in all Europe, in his time, as that worn upon the face of the Emperor Charles V.; and those of Henry IV., Pope Alexander VII., Charles XII. of Sweden, and Frederick II. of Prussia, were scarcely less remarkable. The fierce nose of the youthful Napoleon compacted into the massive one of the Emperor; and then, for a soldierly and heroic nose, where would you look for a finer one than that which marked, among a million, the striking face of Wellington? All that was great in firmness, patience, and heroism in the character of Washington is stamped upon his nose.

Look now at the beautiful noses of the poets. Tasso, Dante, Petrarch,

have noses like the gods of immortal verse. Our own bards are in no way deficient. Study the portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and so down to the present Laureate. See also Molière, Voltaire, Erasmus, Pascal, and Schiller. All men of genius, but how varied! But there is not a greater variety in character than in that feature which the ancients called "honestamentum faciei ;" and which is all that, and something more. Could Schiller's bust change noses with Voltaire's? Try the experiment, and if it proves satisfactory I will abandon the whole theory, and call science a cheat and nature an impostor, and Lavater a dupe and a donkey. Show me a thief with the nose of Algernon Sidney; show me an empty fop, if there are any yet extant, with the nose of Lord Bacon; or some soft poltroon with the profile of Philip the Bold, or Elliott, the hero of Gibraltar; find me, in a group of costermongers and potboys, the noses of Cato and Cicero, Locke and Johnson, Loyola, Titian, Michael Angelo, or Lord Brougham, and you may have my head for a football, and do what you like with its special honestamentum.

Or if you have any doubts of the accuracy of these portraits; if you say that painters are apt to flatter, and so admit the whole argument when you allow that to paint a man with a strong, or bold, or subtle, or heroic nose is flattery, here is a study for you in the nearest stationer's window, or in those admirable collections of photographic portraits in Regent Street, the Strand, or Fleet Street, or scattered over the metropolis. Compare a row of distinguished portraits, from the aristocracy of birth and blood, oft ennobled by noble deeds, or the aristocracy of talent and genius, with another line which you may select from the show-board of the sixpenny galleries, and to which no names are attached. "Comparisons are odious," but in the cause of science they are more than justifiable. I could spend hours in studying the distinguished and beautiful faces which bear upon them the stamp of birth and the refinement of breeding, or the power and energy of genius and ambition-those who have been ennobled in the past, and those who are ennobling themselves in the present.

withMen

But is there no chance for a man without a nose, that is to say, out much of a nose? Wherever there is ambition, there is hope. succeed against great obstacles, and why not against little noses? The case of Socrates is certainly encouraging. Energy not seldom declares itself in a knob that may require one or two generations to mould into symmetry. When a man has shown qualities beyond the expectations based upon his proboscis, there is no doubt that that organ visibly expands, and that it will be found fully developed in his posterity.

I might easily extend my observations to the whole animal creation, and prove the theory of Lavater by an elaborate essay on comparative noseology. What animal has the most remarkable nose? The “halfreasoning elephant," to be sure. Where resides the majesty of the lion, and gives him his title of "king of beasts"? In his lordly and almost

human nose.

The fiercest of fishes, which can kill the monsters of the deep, and even pierce a ship's bottom, owes his prowess to the length and hardness and sharpness of his nose,-just what we should expect of a sword-fish, and a remarkable contrast to the feature which is the distinguishing characteristic of the bottle-nose whale. We might study birds, from the snipe to the eagle; but enough. A word to people with good noses is sufficient: the rest may be expected to give a wide berth to Lavater. They may set their faces against his doctrines, but it is a comfort to think that there is not much harm to be expected from the opposition of a face which is deficient in its most important feature. The advocate of physiognomy may safely appeal to his intelligent, and therefore well-looking, readers; and when the question is put in such an assembly, he may be well contented to take the eyes and nose.

The Rose's Death.

WHEN the west is burnt away,
All but one long crimson ray;
When the warm dew on the vine
Is distilled to fairy wine;

When the birds sleep in their nest,
And the cattle, brooding, rest;

When night looms in darkening sky,-
Then the rose prepares to die.

When the flowers have fairy dreams,
And white moths flit o'er glooming streams;
When elm-branches sway and feather,

Boding of rude autumn weather;

When the gambols are quite done

Of all children of the sun,

And a hush comes on the mirth

Of all creatures of this earth;

When that gold light quits the sky,

Then the rose prepares to die.