A DISSERTATION ON NOSES.

And liberty plucks justice by the nose.

Shakespeare.

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 shall 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 observation on the subject. "From what has been said, may be inferred, that the works of nature, if we compare one species with another, are all equally beautiful; and that, in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or centre of all various forms."

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If this definition be accurate, we are not authorized 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 ideal 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 idealized 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 development 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 features, and complexion. Traces of this derivation are clearly discernable 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 on 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. Ethiopians, Persians, and Egyptians, are separately recognizable, 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 exuberant ridicule, the boisterous raillery, with which the monster was assailed, we may