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The maid-servant, having a smart new bonnet, asks her mistress's permission to go to morning-service; and, when her fellow-servants inquire what the sermon was about, exclaims, with a toss of her head, "I always told Mary what the flirting of that fellow Tomkins would come to: spite of all his fine speeches about the banns, they wasn't no more asked in church than I was."

The labourer, or mechanic, who was formerly enabled to freshen his feet in the grass of the green fields, and recreate his smoke-dried nose with the fragrance of a country breeze, can no longer enjoy that gratification, now that London itself is gone out of town. He prowls about the dingy swamps of Battersea or Mile-End, with a low bull-dog at his heels, which he says he will match, for a gallon of beer, with e'er a dog in England. Being of the same stock with the cockney young lady, who pathetically lamented that she "never could exasperate the Haitch," and then innocently inquired "whether the letter We wasn't a wowell?" he, with a scrupulous inaccuracy, misplaces his H's, V's, and W's. At Vauxhall he stops to buy an ash-stick; because, as he argumentatively tells Bill Gibbons, his companion, “I always likes a hash un." However numerous may be his acquaintance, he never meets one without asking him what they shall drink, having a bibulous capacity as insatiable as that of a dustman, who, beginning at six o'clock in the morning, will swallow a quart of washy small beer at every door on both sides of a long

street.

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The more decent artisan, having stowed four young children, all apparently of the same age, in a handcart, divides with his wife the pleasure of dragging them, for the benefit of country air, as far as the Mother Red Cap in the Hampstead-road, where he ascends into a balcony commanding a fine view of the surrounding dust, smokes his pipe, drinks his ale, and, enjoying the heat of the high road as he lugs his burden back again, declares, that "them country excursions are vastly wholesome."

It was my intention to have contrasted with these scenes "the sound of the church-going bell" in a quiet sequestered village; but, in writing of London, I have so far caught its spirit, as to have left myself little room for further enlargement, and I shall, therefore, comprise all I had to say in the following extract from Wordsworth's "White Doe of Rylstone :"

"From Bolton's old monastic tower,

The bells ring loud with gladsome power;
The sun is bright; the fields are gay,
With people in their best array
Of stole and doublet, hood and scarf,
Along the banks of the crystal Wharf,
Through the vale, retired and lowly,
Trooping to that summons holy.
And up among the moorlands, see
What sprinklings of blithe company!

Of lasses and of shepherd grooms,
That down the steep hills force their way,
Like cattle through the budded brooms;

Path, or no path, what care they?
And thus, in joyous mood, they hie

To Bolton's mouldering Priory.”

ON NOSES.

And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose.
SHAKSPEARE.

IT has been settled by Mr. Alison, in his "Essay on the Philosophy of Taste," that the sublimity or beauty of forms arises altogether from the associations we connect with them, or the qualities of which they are expressive to us; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in discoursing upon personal beauty, maintains, that as nature, in every nation, has one fixed or determinate form towards which she is continually inclining, that form will invariably become the national standard of bodily perfection. "To instance," he proceeds, "in a particular part of a feature: the line that forms the ridge of the nose, is beautiful when it is straight; this, then, is the central form, which is oftener found than either concave, convex, or any other irregular form that may be proposed;"-but this observation he is careful to limit to those countries where the Grecian nose predominates, for he subsequently adds, in speaking of the Ethiopians, "I suppose nobody will doubt, if one of their painters was to paint the goddess of beauty, but that he would represent her black, with thick lips, flat nose, and woolly hair; and it seems to me that he would act very unnaturally if he did not; for by what criterion will any one dispute the propriety of his idea ?" And he thus concludes his observations

on the subject: "From what has been said, it may be inferred, that the works of Nature, if we compare one species with another, are all equally beautiful; and that preference is given from custom, or some association of ideas; and that, in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or centre of all various forms.' If this definition be accurate, we are not authorised in admiring either the Roman or the Jewish noses, both of which are too exorbitant and overbearing-the high-born ultras of their class ;-still less can we fall in love with the Tartarian notions, where the greatest beauties have the least noses, and where, according to Ruybrock, the wife of the celebrated Jenghiz Khan was deemed irresistible, because she had only two holes for a nose. These are the radical noses. In medio tutissimus seems to be as true upon this subject as almost every other, and, in the application of the dictum, we must finally give the preference to the Grecian form, of which such beautiful specimens have been transmitted to us in their statues, vases, and gems. Whether this were the established beau idéal of their artists, or, as is more probable, the predominant line of the existing population, it is certain that, in their sculptures, deviations from it are very rare. In busts from the living, they were, of course, compelled to conform to the original; but I can easily imagine, that if it did not actually break the Grecian chisel, it must have nearly broken the heart of the statuary, who was doomed to scoop out of the marble the mean and indented pug-nose of Socrates. Whence did that extraordinary people derive their noble figure

and beautiful features, which they idealised into such sublime symmetry and exquisite loveliness in the personification of their gods and goddesses? If they were, indeed, as the inhabitants of Attica pretended, the Autocthones, or original natives, springing from the earth, it were an easy solution to maintain, that the soil and climate of that country are peculiarly adapted to the most faultless and perfect developement of the human form: but if, as more sober history affirms, they were a colony from Sais in Egypt, led by Cecrops into Attica, we must be utterly at a loss to account for their form, features, and complexion. Traces of this derivation are clearly discernible in their religion and arts; and the sources of their various orders of architecture are, even now, incontestably evident in the ancient and stupendous temples upon the banks of the Nile; in none of whose sculptures, however, do we discover any approximation to the beautiful features and graceful contour of the Greeks. Æthiopians, Persians, and Egyptians, are separately recognisable, but there are no figures resembling the Athenians. The features of the Sphinx are Nubian; the mummies are invariably dark-coloured; and though their noses are generally compressed by the embalming bandages, there is reason to believe that they have lost very little of their elevation in the process. Leaving the elucidation of this obscure matter to more profound antiquaries, let us return to our central point of beauty-the Nose.

A Slawkenbergius occasionally appeared among the Greeks, as well as the moderns; but from the exube

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