Daily National Intelligencer

FROM THE NEW (LONDON) MONTHLY MAGAZINE FOR APRIL, 1821.

ON NOSES.

"And Liberty plucks Justice by the Nose."—Shaks.

A Slawkenbergius occasionally appeared among the Greeks, as well as the moderns; but from the exuberant ridicule and boisterous raillery with which the monster was assailed, we may presume that a genuine proboscis was of rare occurrence. Many of the lampoons and jokes circulated by the wits of Athens are as extravagant as the noses themselves—and enough has been preserved to fill a horse's nose bag. Let the following, from the Anthology, suffice as a sample:

"Dick cannot wipe his nostrils if he pleases,
(So long his nose is, and his arms so short;)
Nor ever cries "God bless me!" when he sneezes;
He cannot hear so distant a report."

Or this, which is attributed to the Emperor Trajan:

"Let Dick some summer's day expose
Before the sun his monstrous nose,
And stretch his giant mouth, to cause
Its shade to fall upon his jaws;
With nose so long, and mouth so wide,
And those twelve grinders, side by side,
Dick, with a very little trial,
Would make an excellent sun-dial."

Though a roomy nose may afford a good handle for ridicule, there are cases in which a certain magnificence and superabundance of that feature, if not abstractedly becoming, has at least something appropriate in its redundancy, according well with the characteristics of its wearer. It has advantages as well as disadvantages. A man of any spirit is compelled to take cognizance of offences committed under his nose; but with such a promontory as we have been describing, they may come within the strict letter of the phrase, and yet be far enough removed to afford him a good plea for protesting that they escaped his observation. He is not bound to see within his nose, much less beyond it. Should a quarrel, however, become inevitable, the very construction of this member compels him to meet his 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 Torecan, or spoon-bill, and suggesting the idea of his being tied to his own nose to prevent his straying.

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 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 ungracious 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.

"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 for 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 St. 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 "the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus;" but I apprehend that your readers will begin to think that I have led them by the nose long enough; and, lest you, Mr. Editor, should suspect that I am making a handle of the subject, 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,
Though 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.