Toucan, or spoon-bill; and suggesting the idea of his 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 ribbons of a successful general, are trophies of past victories, the colours won iu taverncampaigns. They recal 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 Pitt-club dinner; another of a corporation feast; a third commemorates a tipsy carousal, in support of religion and social order; others attest their owner's 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 pendulous 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 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as if Nature's own hand had fashioned it for one of her noble varieties; but the term has become a misnomer; it is no longer applicable to the inhabitants of the Eternal City, whose nasal bridges seem to have subsided with the decline and fall of their empire.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 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.

Inest sua gratia parvis; let it not 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 they pass

away from our memories like the forms of last year's clouds? Can we forget 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 downfal 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 exclaimed "Voilà une mauvaise plaisanterie !" 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. 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. “Altior homini tantum nasus," says Pliny, " quam novi mores subdolæ irrisioni dicavêre:" and 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.

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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 the articles of his impeachment. When some " Sir Plume, of amber snuffbox 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 not ungraceful foppery: but when a filthy clammy compost is perpetually thrust up the nostrils with a voracious pig-like snort, it 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 recognisable by his total loss of the sense of smelling-by his snuffling and snorting-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 will 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 professed, inveterate, and incurable snuff-taker, (says Lord Stanhope,) at a mo

derate computation takes one pinch in ten minutes. Every pinch, with the agreeable ceremony of 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 twentyfour 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 Saint 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 propensity among our real and pseudo-fashionables.

It was my intention to have written a dissertation upon the probable form of the nose mentioned in Solomon's Song, which, we are informed, was like “the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus ;" and I had prepared some very erudite conjectures as to the composition of the perfume which suggested to Catullus the magnificent idea of wishing to be all nose: