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, 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 in tavern-campaigns. 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 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 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.

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 years 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. “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.

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 sootbags, 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 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 not ungraceful foppery:

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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 moderate 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 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 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 nasty 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:

"Quod tu cum olfacies, Deos rogabis,

Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum."

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 sub

ject, 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,
Since I must follow thee until I die ;—
Since we are bound together by indenture,
The master thou, and the apprentice I,
O be to your Telemachus a Mentor,

Tho' oft invisible, for ever nigh;

Guard him from all disgrace and misadventure,
From hostile tweak, or Love's blind mastery.
So shalt thou quit the city's stench and smoke,
For hawthorn lanes, and copses of young oak,

Scenting the gales of Heaven, that have not yet
Lost their fresh fragrance since the morning broke,
And breath of flowers "with rosy May-dews wet,"
The primrose-cowslip-blue-bell-violet.

H.

SCIENTIFIC AMUSEMENTS.

NO. I.

OF AUTOMATA.

WHILE political economists amuse themselves and the public with the nicely-balanced powers of man as a propagating and eating animal, and philosophers and divines often assure us that he is, in other and higher respects, but a machine of a superior description; we, in especial deference to the latter grave authorities, have been entertaining ourselves with the notion of his mechanical construction, as contrasted with the various imitations of it, that have been occasionally offered to the world. We take it for granted, in this paper, that man is a machine, and shall not presume to arrogate for him any higher pretensions. We know nothing of his impulses as an animal, nor of the duties or influences to which he is subject as a rational being (if such he be); we only propose to introduce to our readers a variety of claimants for the honour of having made a part of him—of imitating portions of his organs, in their actual exercise-and isolated actions of his very mind. What wonder, if, in the progress of these efforts, our artists should occasionally have struck off a complete and clever duck, a learned fly, or a royal eagle!

Automata have been favourite objects of mechanical contri

* From avlos, ipse; and μaouai, excitor, a self-excited, or self-moving machine. 2 G

VOL. I. NO. IV.

vance from a very early period. If the term, indeed, may be allowed to include what some writers have considered under it, their history would quickly swell into a volume. The celebrated Glanvil, for instance, speaks of "the art whereby the Almighty governs the motions of the great automaton" of the universe! Bishop Wilkins ranks the sphere of Archimedes amongst the aντομаτа σraτα, or "such as move only according to the contrivance of their several parts, and not according to their whole frame." It was, in fact, an early orrery, according to Claudian: Jupiter in parvo cum cerneret æthera vitro, Risit, et ad superos talia dicta dedit; Huccine mortalis progressa potentia curæ ?

Jam meus in fragili luditur orbe labor, &c.

This learned prelate has even extended the application of the term to machines moved (in consequence of their peculiar construction) by external forces or elements, as mills, ships, &c. Its modern acceptation, however, and that to which we shall restrict ourselves, will not include all machines that are self, or internally moved. It is confined to the mechanical imitation of the functions and actions of living animals, and particularly those of man.

*

The celebrated story of the statue of Memnon (one of the wonders of Ancient Egypt) has some pretensions to lead the way in this historical sketch. We have positive testimony to the circumstance of the most beautiful sounds being emitted from this statue, at the rising and setting of the sun; and from the pedestal after the statue was overthrown. What was the contrivance in this case, it may be vain to conjecture; but automata are, by profession, a puzzling race. If a certain disposition of strings, exposed to the rarefaction of the air, or to the morning and evening breezes, after the manner of our Æolian harps, produced these sounds; or if any method of arranging the internal apertures so as to receive them from a short distance, were the artifice, a considerable acquaintance with the science of music, and with acoustics generally, will be argued. Wilkins quotes a musical invention of Cornelius Dreble of similar pretensions, which " being set in the sunshine, would, of itself, render a soft and pleasant harmony, but being removed into the shade would presently become silent."

The statues and the flight of Dadalus are equally famousand, perhaps, fabulous. Aristotle, however, speaks of the former in his treatise De Anima, 1. i. c. 3, as successful imitations of the human figure and human functions in walking, running,

Strabo, lib. xvii.