Page images
PDF
EPUB

very large nose, gave occasion to a man of humour,* one of the guests, to vent a number of witticisms, good or bad, on this monstrous nose, of which he pretended to be afraid. The Abbé Genest arrived, who merely looked in, and attempted to steal off, that he might not disturb the party : but the Cardinal recalled him, and desired him to take his seat. Then the bel humoré having considered this second apparition of a great nose, affected a greater degree of terror, and exclaimed to the Cardinal; Eminentissimo, per un, si puo soffrire, ma per duo no;† and throwing down his napkin, he disappeared with all speed."

We read, also, of Despointis, a Parisian counsellor, whose nose was so immoderately long, that it attracted the notice of passengers in the street, who would turn and gaze

*Un bel humoré.

May it please your eminence, I could bear one, but it is impossible to endure two.

Histoire des Membres de l'Academie Fran,

çoise, tom. iii. p. 454•

at it, to the hazard of their lives. The shadow of this nose happened one day to fall on a very little counsellor, named Coqueley, and eclipsed him so totally, that the judge could not perceive him when it was his turn to plead. Coqueley remonstrated, like Ragotin, but with as little effect; Despointis would not yield his place. The little hero, exasperated beyond all patience, seized the point of his antagonist's nose, and turning it aside, according to the laws of the lever, said, you may stay where you are, but I am determined that your nose shall make room for me.

I have La Rinomachie or the Battle of Noses, a French poem, as long as Bruscambille's Prologue, but it contains nothing worthy of attention.

Great attention was paid to the form of the nose among the Roman Catholic clergy; some of the disqualifications for priest's orders were, little noses, because they implied ignorance; great noses, because the owner

* L'Heureux Chanoine. Paris, 1707.

was supposed to be puffed up with pride (as he well might, according to the doctrines of which I have given a view) and wry-noses, because they implied a perverseness of understanding.*

The passage quoted above from VigneulMarville coincides with the opinions of Mr. Lavater, who has shewed himself a zealous champion for the consequence of the nose, and for homogeneity of features.

This very ingenious, but too fanciful writer, has formed an indication of genius which I believe is entirely his own, from the degree of the returning angle which is formed by the junction of the nose with the upper lip. I doubt the justness of such arbitrary marks.

Mr. Lavater has been puzzled, I observe, to explain the expression of anxiety in Locke's portrait. It was certainly independent of that great man's character. He was subject to fits of asthma, and contract,

*Man of Sin, p. 76.

ed the appearance of distressful struggles from his sufferings in that disease. A medical observer would pronounce Locke to have been asthmatic, from the first view of his busts and prints. I believe, indeed, that almost every disease is characterized by a peculiar expression of the countenance, and that medical physiognomy might be cultivated with the highest benefit to mankind. Unfortunately, to treat of this art with success, an author must not only be an excellent physician, but a good painter.

I shall close my view of foreign writers on the philosophy of noses, with Riolan, who as a Frenchman and an anatomist felt a double interest in the discussion. "The nose," he informs us, "is the index of genius and understanding." He then repeats the story of the Persians, and adds from Plato, that it was the duty of the ennuchs, who attended the youths of the royal family, to form their noses elegantly, by keeping tubes in their nostrils. He adds, " In lege Mosaica Levitic. cap. xxi. qui naso pravo erant

præditi, judicati fuere indigni sacerdotio, proinde Venusino poetæ in arte poetica, vita displiceret, si deformem obtinuisset nasum; Non magis esse velim, quam pravo vivere naso,” &c.*

I have observed, that our language is rather deficient in allusions to this organ, especially respecting its varieties, either of length or curtailment. Dunton, indeed, says, that judge Jeffreys had a nose fit for the great service of destroying schismatics, " for he told the grand jury at Taunton, that he could smell a Presbyterian forty miles.Ӡ And Dr. Johnson called sagacity the nose of the mind. But a later attempt has been made, to detect this figure in the very rudiments of our language, by the ingenious Dr. Beddoes. "We have," says he, "a remarkable class of noun-substantives, as they are called by the grammarian; though ac

*Anthropographia, p. 213. It is needless to observe how much Riolan has mistaken the sense of Horace in this passage.

+ Panegyric on Jeffreys.

Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii. p. 599.

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »