NOTES ON NOSES.


                                   BY

                             EDEN WARWICK.

   “‘Mayhap there is more meant than is said in it,’ quoth my father.
 ‘Learned men, brother Toby, don’t write dialogues upon Long Noses for
                      nothing.’”—TRISTRAM SHANDY.

[Illustration]

                             _NEW EDITION._

                                LONDON:
                RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
                                 1864.




                                 LONDON
                    PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
                           NEW-STREET SQUARE




                                PREFACE.


With regard to a Preface to his Book, an Author has to contend with
three great, but unequal, difficulties. The first and greatest, is to
persuade his Publisher to issue it without a Preface; the next, is to
write one himself; and the third and least, is to get some one to write
it for him. Now there is a wise old saw which says, “Of divers evils
choose the least;” and as the learned Slawkenbergius (so says Tristram
Shandy) has prefaced his FOLIO on Noses with a clause which exactly
explains our own qualifications and reasons for writing on the same
important subject, we invoke him to relieve us of the third difficulty:
“‘ever since I understood,’ quoth Slawkenbergius, ‘anything—or rather
_what was what_,—and could perceive that the point of Long Noses had
been too loosely handled by all who had gone before—have I,
Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and irresistible
call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.’”

Now this is exactly our own case, and must, therefore, suffice for our
Preface; nevertheless, we cannot flatter ourselves that our brief hints
will be eulogized, like the gigantic folio of Hafen Slawkenbergius, as
“an institute of all that is necessary to be known of Noses.” It
professes to be nothing more than an introduction to the subject of
Nasology; written originally for the use of friends, and afterwards
extended for publication. This will account for some discrepancies which
may be perceptible in the style—discrepancies which it was thought best
not to remove, as the additions were on subjects of a more grave and
important character than the original sketch; and, therefore, the
diversities of style appeared to be rather consistent and advantageous.

  _May 26, 1848._




                               CONTENTS.


                                 PAGE

              PREFACE                                 iii


                              CHAPTER I.

              OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF NOSES            1


                              CHAPTER II.

              OF THE ROMAN NOSE                        13


                             CHAPTER III.

              OF THE GREEK NOSE                        43


                              CHAPTER IV.

              OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE                   50


                              CHAPTER V.

              HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE             63


                              CHAPTER VI.

              OF THE JEWISH NOSE                       89


                             CHAPTER VII.

              OF THE SNUB NOSE AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE  97


                             CHAPTER VIII.

              OF FEMININE NOSES                       107


                              CHAPTER IX.

              OF NATIONAL NOSES                       120




                            NOTES ON NOSES.




                               CHAPTER I.
                    OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF NOSES.


It has not been hastily, nor until after long and careful observation,
that the theory propounded in the following pages has been published; a
theory which, at first sight, may appear to some wild and absurd, to
others simply ridiculous, to others wicked and heretical,[1] and to
others fraught with social mischief and danger.

Nevertheless, we shall not begin by deprecating the ridicule or the
censure of any one. The only vindication which an author is entitled to
offer, is that which his works themselves present. If his cause be a
good one, it requires no apology; if it be a bad one, to vindicate it is
either useless or baneful; useless, if it blind no one to his errors;
baneful, if it induce any one blindly to receive his brass for sterling
gold.

The only circumstance which can attach any value to our observations is,
that they are entirely original, and wholly unbiassed by the theories of
any other writers on physiognomy. When we commenced observing Noses, we
just knew that some few forms of the Nose had names given them, as the
Roman, the Greek, &c.; but we regarded these as mere artistic
definitions of form, and were wholly ignorant what mental
characteristics had been ascribed to them. So far as this nomenclature
went, it appeared best to adopt it, as affording well-known designations
of Nasal profiles; and our investigations were, therefore, commenced by
endeavouring to discover whether these from of Nose characterised any,
and what, mental properties. In order to do this with accuracy, it was
absolutely necessary still to keep the mind unacquainted with the system
of any other writers, if such there were, lest it should unconsciously
imbibe preconceptions and hints which would render its independent
researches open to the suspicion of bias. We felt that if the
characteristics attributed by us to Noses, after long and extensive
observation, corresponded with those of any other writer, a powerful
corroboration of our views would thus be gained.

It may happen, therefore (and it is hoped it will be so) that we may
sometimes appear to have plagiarised from other physiognomists, and to
have adopted their views; but this correspondence must, nevertheless, be
accepted as a further proof of the accuracy of their and our honest
independent labours.

It was impossible, however, amidst much multifarious reading, to keep
the mind, latterly, wholly ignorant that some mental characteristics had
been ascribed to Noses; but into the nature of these we never inquired,
nor are we aware that anything has been done, beyond throwing out a few
unconnected, unattested hints, towards a systematic deduction of mental
qualifications from Nasal formation.

If it is improper to vindicate one’s self, it might not seem altogether
unfitting to vindicate one’s subject from ridicule; and it might appear
prudent, if not altogether necessary, to commence by vindicating the
Nose from the charge of being too ridiculous an organ to be seriously
discoursed upon. But this ridiculousness is mere prejudice;
intrinsically one part of the face is as worthy as another, and we may
feel assured that He who gave the _os sublime_ to man, did not place, as
its foremost and most prominent feature, a _ridiculous_ appendage.

But this prejudice ought not to weigh with any thinking mind. If it is
true—as Dr. Prichard asserts, and as every ethnologist admits—that
protruding jaws indicate a low state of civilisation, an animal and
degraded mind, is it more ridiculous to assert that the flat, depressed
Nose, which always accompanies the prognathous jaws, is likewise an
indication of a similar mind? If it is true that the oval form of head
indicates a high-class of mind, and a capacity for the highest
civilisation, is it absurd to assert that the Romano-Greek Nose, which
generally accompanies, and is characteristic of that form of head, is
likewise indicative of a similar mind? Nasology is strictly in harmony
with the deductions of the ablest physiognomists and ethnologists. It
contradicts no laws which have been established between mind and matter;
on the contrary, it upholds, supports, and maintains the investigations
of the ablest writers on anthropology, and has only not been touched
upon by them, because the necessity they are under of forming many of
their deductions from skulls, precludes their making the soft parts of
the face a standard of comparison.

To come then at once to our subject. We have a belief, founded on
long-continued, personal observation, that there is more in a Nose than
most owners of that appendage are generally aware. We believe that,
besides being an ornament to the face, a breathing apparatus, or a
convenient handle by which to grasp an impudent fellow, it is an
important index to its owner’s character; and that the accurate
observation and minute comparison of an extensive collection of Noses of
persons whose mental characteristics are known, justifies a Nasal
Classification, and a deduction of some points of mental organisation
therefrom. It will not be contended that all the faculties and
properties of mind are revealed by the Nose;—for instance, we can read
nothing of Temper or the Passions from it.[2] Perhaps it rather reveals
Power and Taste—Power or Energy to carry out Ideas, and the Taste or
Inclination which dictates or guides them. As these will always very
much form a man’s outward character, the proposition which is sought to
be established is this:—“THE NOSE IS AN IMPORTANT INDEX TO CHARACTER.”

It may be prudent to observe that we utterly repudiate the doctrine of
the Phrenologists, that the form of the Body affects the manifestations,
and even properties, of the Mind.

We contend that the Mind forms the Nose, and not the Nose the Mind. We
have carefully endeavoured to avoid phraseology which should induce a
supposition that we entertain the latter absurdity; but here enter this
protest once for all, lest a want of precision in our language, or the
obtuseness of critics, should cause us to be charged with it.

It is in vain to require proof of a material connection between the Nose
and the Mind, for it is utterly impossible to demonstrate to sense the
seat of the divine particle. Material organs cannot apprehend immaterial
existence: they even fail to perceive some of the more tenuous
materialisms, air, light, heat, electricity, &c., which are known only
by their effects. It is in vain to deny physiognomy—of which Nasology is
only a department—because we cannot understand by what processes mind
acts on the features; because we cannot see any material organisms which
operate to contract the muscles in laughter or pain, or which impel the
blood to or from the countenance when consciousness or fear affects the
mind. It is in vain to deny the blush or the pallor because we know not
_how_ the pulsations of the heart and the flow of blood are affected by
mental impressions. It is one of the strongest proofs of the
immateriality of the soul, that while its existence cannot be denied, it
cannot be anatomically demonstrated, nor rendered visible to sense. The
mode in which Mind acts on Matter is one of the arcana of Nature, which,
perhaps, human science will never penetrate. It is a secret reserved for
that state in which the mind will act independently of material media.
However numerous and plausible the theories propounded to explain the
mystery, they all terminate like the Indian’s world-supports, and the
chain of connection breaks at the last link. It is, therefore, in vain
to deny physiognomy because we can demonstrate no material connection
between the mind and the features, nor would any sane objector insist on
such demonstration; yet such demonstration has been insisted on, and the
absence of it adduced as a fundamental objection both to physiognomy and
phrenology by critics at a loss for valid objections.

And here we might descant, at considerable length, and with much show of
learning, on the influence of the Mind over the Body. We might impugn
the wisdom of those who, undertaking to cure either, have forgotten that
they were so intimately united and mutually dependent, that they could
not be treated separately with success. We might show that the first
step of the physician towards curing mental disorder, is to free the
body from disease; and that of him who would cure the body, is,
ofttimes, to apply his remedies to the derangement of the mind. But,
though by so doing we might swell our pages and eke out an additional
chapter—an important consideration if we were a mere book-maker—we shall
not, as we have some qualms of conscience whether it would be quite
germane to the matter in hand. It might not, however, be out of place to
remind the reader that physiognomy, or the form which mind gives to the
features, is universally recognised. A pleasant mouth, a merry eye, a
sour visage, a stern aspect, are some of the common phrases by which we
daily acknowledge ourselves to be physiognomists; for by these
expressions we mean, not that the mouth is pleasant or the visage sour,
but that such is the mind which shines out from them. If it were the
face alone which we thus intended, we should never trouble or concern
ourselves about a human countenance, nor be attracted, nor repulsed by
one, any more than if it were a carved head on a gothic waterspout, or a
citizen’s door-knocker. We all acknowledge the impression given by the
mind to the mouth and the eyes because they express Temper and the
Passions—those feelings which more immediately interest us in our mutual
intercourse—and because they change with the feelings; now flashing with
anger, or sparkling with pleasure, compressing with rage, or smiling
with delight.

But because the Nose is uninfluenced by the feelings which agitate and
vary the mind, and, is, therefore, immovable and unvaried, no one will
hear the theory of Nasology broached without incredulity and risibility.
Because the Nose is subject only to those faculties of mind which are
permanent and unfluctuating; and is, therefore, likewise permanent and
unfluctuating in its form, men have paid no attention to its
indications, and will, accordingly, abuse as an empiric and dotard the
first Nasologist. But, is there, _à priori_, any thing so unreasonable
in attributing mental characteristics to the Nose, when we all daily
read each other’s minds in the Nose’s next-door neighbours, the eyes and
mouth? Is not the _à priori_ inference entirely in favour of a negative
reply? And that, _à posteriori_, it may confidently be replied to in the
negative will, it is hoped, presently appear.

There is here room for another long disquisition to point out the
advantages of Nasology. How that the permanency and immobility of the
Nose forbid hypocrisy to mould it to any artificial feelings, as the
eyes and the mouth may be. And how this immobility, together with its
prominency and incapability of being concealed, like bad phrenological
bumps, render it a sure guide to some parts of our fellow-creatures’
mental organization. But it would be premature to do this before proving
somewhat of the truth of Nasology; and when that is done, no one will
deny that it has its uses, though it may be disputed what those are.

Nevertheless, we must earnestly protest against the fallacy of
attempting to judge what any person _is_ from his Nose; we can only
judge of natural tendency and capacity—education and external
circumstances of a thousand different kinds, may have swerved the mind
from its original tendency, or prevented the development of inherent
faculties. It is in this unfair and uncharitable asserting dogmatically
the disposition and character, vices and virtues, of a man, that
phrenologists so greatly err; whereas they ought to confine their
inferences from external development of organs, to capacity and tendency
only.

The impossibility of giving such numerous pictorial illustrations as the
subject properly demands, will confine the examples adduced to those
only of which portraits are well known and easily accessible. If,
therefore, the proofs are thought insufficient in number, it must be
attributed to this circumstance alone. It would have been easy to have
swelled them by a number of names, the right of which to be included in
the lists the majority of persons would have been unable to verify.
Nevertheless, the examples will be found much more numerous and more
easily verifiable than those which have been deemed sufficient to
establish Phrenology as an hypothesis, if not as a science; and, had we,
like the principal expounder of Phrenology,[3] dragged in as ‘proofs’
nameless gentlemen of our acquaintance, we might have still further
extended the lists of examples. But it seemed to our humble judgment, to
be demanding more from the reader’s good nature than would be compatible
with sound criticism, to ask him to accept such unsupported _dicta_ as
_proofs_. Of course, very many of the examples by which our own mind has
been satisfied have been drawn from personal observation, among friends
and acquaintance; and not only have these been the most numerous proofs,
but also by far the most satisfactory, as they afforded the most exact
and undeniable profiles, and the most noticeable mental characteristics.
The slightest incorrectness in the artist, may render useless a
pictorial example; but when we are looking upon the original itself,
there can be no mistake. A thousand minutiæ of character may escape a
biographer, which appear plainly in the man himself.

Nevertheless, we felt so strongly how unfitting it would be to offer
such mere personal observations as _proofs_, that we have carefully
refrained from admitting any example which is not open to the
observation of almost every one.

This is a drawback which we feel greatly; it reduces our instances to a
hundredth part of those which might be adduced; but we must submit to
it, only asking of the reader’s generosity to take it into account.
Another favour which we beg is, that the reader will suspend his
judgment until the subject is concluded, and he has the whole system,
with all its proofs, before him.

We scruple not to admit, that at present the system is incomplete. We
rather court inquiry, and solicit additional facts, than peremptorily
dogmatize on conclusions drawn from our own limited—though
extensive—number of observations. But it is so much the fashion for
every wild theorist to dogmatize on his theory, and insist upon it, _per
fas et nefas_, as perfect, unassailable, and complete, that it is almost
deemed reprehensible to suggest a notion for the consideration of the
world, or to propound anything which the author is modest enough to
admit is improvable. Such, however, was not the manner of the true
philosophers of former days. If Copernicus had delayed propounding the
system of the universe which bears his name, until he could explain by
it all the planetary and sidereal motions, it might have slumbered
unknown for another century or two, and so we should not yet have
arrived at our present enlarged understanding of it. If Bacon had waited
for a complete Natural History, ere he published his Novum Organum, we
might still have been groping after the Sciences with the dark lantern
of Aristotle and the schools. If Newton had withheld his theory of Light
until he could burn a diamond, our knowledge of the nature of light
might still be in its infancy.

These examples must furnish an apology for submitting for candid
consideration and further development, a theory which we believe to be
well-founded, but which is capable of improvement and extension.


Subject to the foregoing remarks, the following Physical Classification
of Noses[4] is submitted, as being, in part, well-known and
long-established, because well-defined and clearly marked:—

          Class   I. THE ROMAN, or Aquiline Nose.
          Class  II. THE GREEK, or Straight Nose.
          Class III. THE COGITATIVE, or Wide-nostrilled Nose.
          Class  IV. THE JEWISH, or Hawk Nose.
          Class   V. THE SNUB NOSE, and
          Class  VI. THE CELESTIAL, or Turn-up Nose.

Between these there are infinite crosses and intermixtures which will at
first embarrass the student, but which, after a little practice, he will
be able to distinguish with tolerable precision. A compound of different
Noses will of course indicate a compound character; and it is only in
the rather rare instance of a perfect Nose of any of the classes that we
find a character correspondingly strongly developed. We shall endeavour
to support each part of the hypothesis by well-defined and striking
instances, selecting the most decided and perfect noses of each class,
and at the same time the most peculiar and decided characters.

[Illustration]


CLASS I. THE ROMAN, or Aquiline Nose, is rather convex, but undulating,
as its name aquiline imports. It is usually rugose and coarse; but when
otherwise, it approaches the Greek nose, and the character is materially
altered.

It indicates great decision, considerable Energy, Firmness, Absence of
Refinement, and Disregard for the _bienséances_ of life.

[Illustration]

CLASS II. THE GREEK, or Straight Nose, is perfectly straight; any
deviation from the right line must be strictly noticed. If the deviation
tend to convexity, it approaches the Roman Nose, and the character is
improved by an accession of energy; on the other hand, when the
deviation is towards concavity, it partakes of the “Celestial,” and the
character is weakened. It should be fine and well chiselled, but not
sharp.

It indicates Refinement of character, Love for the fine arts and
_belles-lettres_, Astuteness, Craft, and a preference for indirect,
rather than direct action. Its owner is not without some energy in
pursuit of that which is agreeable to his tastes; but, unlike the owner
of the Roman Nose, he cannot exert himself in _opposition_ to his
tastes. When associated with the Roman Nose, and distended slightly at
the end by the Cogitative, it indicates the most useful and intellectual
of characters; and is the highest and most beautiful form which the
organ can assume.[5]

[Illustration]

CLASS III. THE COGITATIVE, or Wide-nostrilled Nose, is, as its secondary
name imports, wide at the end, thick and broad; not clubbed, but
_gradually_ widening from below the bridge. The other noses are seen in
profile, but this in full face.

It indicates a Cogitative mind, having strong powers of Thought, and
given to close and serious Meditation. Its indications are, of course,
much dependent on the form of the Nose in profile, which decides the
turn the cogitative power will take. Of course, it never occurs alone;
and is usually associated with Classes I and II, rarely with IV, still
more seldom with V and VI.[6] The entire absence of it produces the
“sharp” nose, which is not classified, as sharpness is only a negative
quality, being the defect of breadth,[7] and, therefore, indicates
defect of cogitative power.


[Illustration]

CLASS IV. THE JEWISH, or Hawk Nose, is very convex, and preserves its
convexity like a bow, throughout the whole length from the eyes to the
tip. It is thin and sharp.

It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly matters; a deep insight
into character, and facility of turning that insight to profitable
account.

[Illustration]

CLASSES V AND VI. THE SNUB NOSE, and the Turn-up, _poeticè_ CELESTIAL
Nose. The form of the former is sufficiently indicated by its name. The
latter is distinguished by its presenting a continuous concavity from
the eyes to the tip. It is converse in shape to the Jewish nose.


N.B. The Celestial must not be confounded with a Nose which, belonging
to one of the other classes in the upper part, terminates in a slight
distension of the tip; for this, so far from prejudicing the character,
rather adds to it warmth and activity.

We associate the Snub and the Celestial in nearly the same category, as
they both indicate natural weakness, mean, disagreeable disposition,
with petty insolence, and divers other characteristics of conscious
weakness, which strongly assimilate them (indeed, a true Celestial Nose
is only a Snub turned up); while their general poverty of distinctive
character, makes it almost impossible to distinguish them. Nevertheless
there is a difference between their indications; arising, however,
rather from difference of intensity than of character. The Celestial is,
by virtue of its greater length, decidedly preferable to the Snub; as it
has all the above unfortunate propensities in a much less degree, and is
not without some share of small shrewdness and fox-like common sense; on
which, however, it is apt to presume, and is, therefore, a more impudent
Nose than the Snub.

The following subordinate rules are applicable to all kinds of Noses,
and must be attended to before forming a judgment on any Nose.

1. The Power of a Nose depends upon its length in proportion to the
profile. A Nose should not be less than one-third of the entire length
of the profile, from the root of the hair to the tip of the chin.

2. The character of a Nose is weakened in intensity by forming too
great, or too small an angle with the general profile of the face. This
angle, if as great as 40°, is not good, anything beyond that is bad;
about 30° is best. Angles: [Illustration: 45°.] [Illustration: 40°.]
[Illustration: 30°.] —less than [Illustration: 25°.] becomes a snub.

3. Attention should be paid to the angle which the basal line of the
Nose forms with the upper lip. This angle affects intensity, and also
temperament. If it is an obtuse angle, as thus [Illustration], the
consequent abbreviation of the Nose (for a long Nose has always more
Power than a short one) weakens the character, but the temperament is
cheerful, gay, and lively; if on the other hand the angle is acute, as
thus [Illustration], the elongation of the Nose adds much to the
intensity of the character indicated by the profile; but the disposition
is generally melancholy, and, if a very acute angle, desponding and fond
of gloomy thoughts. Fox (the Martyrologist), John Knox, Calvin, George
Herbert, Edmund Spenser, and Dante, are illustrations of the melancholy
Nose.

[Illustration:

  DANTE.
]




                              CHAPTER II.
                           OF THE ROMAN NOSE.

  CLASS I.—THE ROMAN, or Aquiline Nose, is rather convex, but
    undulating, as its name aquiline imports. It is usually rugose and
    coarse; but when otherwise it approaches the Greek Nose, and the
    character is materially altered.

  It indicates great Decision, considerable Energy, Firmness, Absence of
    refinement, and Disregard for the _bienséances_ of life.


Numerous portraits, both in marble and on coins, demonstrate that this
Nose was very frequent among the Romans, and peculiarly characteristic
of that nation. Hence its name. The persevering energy, stern
determination, and unflinching firmness of the conquerors of the world;
their rough, unrefined character, which, notwithstanding the example of
Greece, never acquired the polish of that country, all indicate the
accuracy of the mental habit attributed to the owner of this Nose.

Sufficient stress has never been laid by historians on national
characteristics. The peculiar psychonomy of nations is an element which
is never taken into account, when the historical critic endeavours to
elucidate the causes and consequences of events. He judges of all
nations by the standard of his own, regardless of age, climate,
physiognomy, and psychonomy. This is as absurd as the fashion the Greeks
had of deducing foreign names and titles from the Greek, a practice
which Cicero wittily ridicules. In this ridicule we willingly join; yet
we are equally open to it, when we interpret the actions of foreign
nations by our own national standard.

It was the psychonomic difference between the Romans and the Greeks,
which prevented the former from benefiting so efficiently from the
lessons in art and philosophy of the latter, as they would have done had
their minds been congenial.

The refinement which Rome received from Greece, was converted in the
transfer into a refinement of coarse sensual luxury. Rome, after the
conquest of Greece, filled its forums and halls with Greek workmanship,
and its schools with Greek learning; nevertheless Roman mind advanced
not one step beyond its original coarseness.

At the period when Rome possessed itself by conquest of the principal
works of Grecian art, her citizens only regarded them as household
furniture of but little value. Polybius narrates that, after the siege
of Corinth, he saw some Roman soldiers playing at dice upon a picture of
Bacchus, by Aristides; a picture esteemed one of the finest in the
world. When King Attalus offered 600,000 sesterces (£4,845 15_s._) for
this picture, Mummius, the Roman Consul, thinking there must be some
magic property in it, to make it worth such an enormous sum, refused to
sell it, and hung it up in the Temple of Ceres at Rome. So little were
the Romans conscious of the real value of the treasures of Greek art,
that Mummius covenanted with the masters of the ships, hired to convey
the spoils of Corinth to Rome, that if any of the exquisite paintings
and statuary should be lost, _they should replace them with new
ones_![8]

It is not surprising, therefore, that Rome, although possessed of
infinitely greater wealth, a larger population, and the splendid
examples of Greece, not only produced no artist of merit, but receded
far from the high standard which Greece, notwithstanding its internal
divisions, its comparative poverty, small extent, and unassisted genius,
had established. There is no way of accounting for these facts, but by
the difference in their psychonomy. The genius of Rome was of a very
different nature from that of Greece, and was incompetent to advance the
great work which the latter had commenced.

This is an example which, with numerous others that occur in the world’s
history, might teach those who, in modern phrase, assert that the
uniform order of the world is _progress_, that retrogression has
ofttimes been the apparent order, and that it is a foolish
short-sightedness to judge of the order of the world from a few hundred
years in its history. The Greek who remembered the magnificent works of
his country, and looked upon the degenerate splendor of Rome, no doubt
equally dogmatically asserted that the world was in its dotage, that it
had retrograded, and would never be regenerated.

The ancient Hindoo, who, in ages too remote for history to record, wept
over the fallen splendor and lost power, the ruined wealth and
degenerate arts of his country; the Egyptian who, in ante-Mosaic
periods, beheld the fierce and barbarous Shepherd-Kings trampling with
haughty contempt and hostile fanaticism on the wonderful works which
still astonish the _progressed_ world; the Assyrian, who, a century
before the foundation of Rome, witnessed the downfall of his country’s
magnificence and extensive empire,—all equally thought that these
glories would never be resuscitated, and that the best ages of the world
were past away; and if any of them had been told, that in other lands
and other climes they would, in far-distant ages, be outvied, he would
have turned with incredulity from the prospect, and have demanded what
race was to surpass the glorious achievements of his own.

But the modern dogmatist tries to take his case out of the argument, by
pretending that Christianity will protect the world from again
retrograding. This is the mere pride of the Pharisee, who flatters
himself that he is not as other men are, that his Christianity is too
pure to fall, and his knowledge too vast to be blasted. Or else he
forgets that the pure Christianity of the first disciples and martyrs
failed to preserve succeeding generations from the inroads of sin and
darkness more overwhelming than had ever blackened the face of Europe
since the commencement of the historical period. The dogmatist of those
days sighed over the world’s degeneracy, and saw not through the
surrounding gloom any hopeful gleam of light; just as the modern
dogmatist rejoices over the world’s advance, without perceiving any
overhanging shadow of darkness.

Both judge of the world by their own time and circumstances, just as we
are too apt to judge of each other by ourselves.

A due regard to the psychonomy of nations would throw much light upon
many abstruse points of history, and often serve to corroborate
narrations which appear marvellous and incredible to us. Thus, as we
have, for the most part,[9] left off eating human flesh in these islands
for some thousand years or more, historians reject as utterly incredible
that our forefathers were cannibals; and some still more tender-hearted
philanthropists even venture to assert that cannibalism has not and
never had an existence anywhere. Whereas, if they would compare the
evidence with the psychonomy of the nations of whom the circumstance is
narrated, instead of with our own, they would instantly perceive in it
nothing unnatural nor incredible. Thus also infidel writers, unable to
comprehend the fervent and assured hope of a blessed immortality which
supported the martyrs, deny, as repugnant to human nature, the patient
sufferings of the early Christians. And thus again commentators on the
Bible, both infidel and credent, have made sad havoc of many texts, by
endeavoring to interpret them by European manners and habits. This
inattention to national psychonomy is, moreover, a fertile cause of the
mal-administration of colonies, and was the root of nine-tenths of the
errors in Indian affairs during the last century.

Seeing, then, the importance of fully understanding the psychonomy of
nations before criticizing their records, we should reject no probable
key to that requisite knowledge; and if physiognomy would furnish such a
key, it should be hailed as an important element in historical
criticism. This consideration has induced us to complete our system by a
few remarks on National Noses. For no part of the physiognomy is more
needful to be comprehended than the Nose, if Nasology be correct;
because the mental faculties which it pourtrays are more important than
those revealed in the other features; and because, being immovable and
permanent in its outline, the artist gives us its national or individual
form, without the distortion which the action or passion exhibited may
make it necessary to throw over the other more pliant features.

Reserving, then, till a future chapter, any further observations on
National Noses, we will now consider a few individual instances of the
Roman Nose.

This Nose is common to all great conquerors and warriors, and other
persons who have exhibited vast energy and perseverance in overcoming
great obstacles without regard to personal ease, or the welfare of their
fellow-men.


The following have pure, or very nearly pure, Roman Noses:—

                Rameses II (Sesostris).
                Julius Cæsar.
                Henri Quatre.
                Charles V. of Spain.
                Duke of Wellington.
                Canute.
                Gonzalo de Cordova (the Great Captain).
                William III.
                Sir W. Wallace.
                Condé (the Great).
                Robert Bruce.
                Queen Elizabeth.
                Edward I.
                Columbus.
                Sir Francis Drake.
                Cortez.
                Pizarro.
                Washington.
                Henry VII.
                Cato the Censor.
                Earl of Chatham.
                Ignatius Loyola.

The well-known, because (as their Noses likewise attest) strongly
marked, characters of these persons render it unnecessary to allude even
briefly to their biographies. Their names are sufficient to bring at
once before the mind their energetic, persevering, and determined
characters. They were persons whom no hardships could deter, no fears
daunt, no affections turn aside from any purpose which they had
undertaken: that purpose being (from the absence of the Cogitative)
always of a physical character; and (from the absence of the Greek)
always pursued with a stern and reckless disregard of their own and
others’ physical ease and welfare. Their successes were attained by
energy and perseverance, not by forethought and deep scheming. They were
not the men of the closet, but of the field. Physical action, not mental
activity, was their adopted road to success. For this reason, and
because history is little more than a chronicle of physical action, wars
and bloodshed, the owners of Roman Noses occupy the largest portion of
their fellow-men’s thoughts and of the historical page.

The ancients acknowledged the foregoing Nasal Classification, for they
represented Jupiter, Hercules, Minerva, Bellatrix, and other energetic
Deities with Roman Noses, which Plato designates, from its being
indicative of Power and Energy, ‘the Royal Nose,’—while they gave pure
Greek Noses to the more refined Apollo, Bacchus, Juno, Venus, &c. The
debased and unintellectual Fawn and Satyr they pourtrayed with Snub or
Celestial Noses; thus imparting to their countenances the low cunning or
bestial inanity appropriate to those mythological inventions.

It must not, however, be inferred from the majority of warriors’ names
in the above list, that the Roman Nose necessarily indicates a warrior.

These names are only selected because they afford well-known and easily
verifiable instances, requiring neither pictorial nor biographical
illustration. Energy may be equally conspicuous in any other department
of life, and display itself as fully in the civilian as in the warrior.
Two of the individuals adduced are striking instances of this:—Cato the
Censor, and the Earl of Chatham. They were men of remarkable parallelism
of character, and, though differing in other facial features, their
Noses were very similar.

[Illustration:

  CATO THE CENSOR.

  (_From a gem in the Florentine Museum._)
]

The events of their early life—those events which always bear most
clearly the impress of the mind, because actuated by choice, and not by
present or future consequences—were almost identical. They both entered
the army in youth, and both quitted it for the Senate. Here each
displayed those powers of eloquence which raised them to the highest
eminence, and will transmit their names to the latest posterity. Its
peculiar feature was that energetic, powerful, and determined vehemence
of language, which takes the mind prisoner, and carries the judgment
with it by storm. It was irresistible. Before it all minds of less
power, though of greater intellect and activity, recoiled. The orations
of Cato are unhappily lost. But Cicero, a master of eloquence, and well
enabled to compare them with similar compositions, passes upon them the
highest eulogiums. The eloquence of Cato has been compared, for its
force and energy, to the eloquence of that Demosthenes before whom
Philip of Macedon quailed, and whose tremendous orations have given the
name of Philippics to all sarcastic and vehement invectives. Of
Chatham’s eloquence, it has been said by Wilkes: “Nothing could
withstand the force of that contagion. The fluent Murray has faltered,
and even Fox shrunk back appalled from an adversary ‘fraught with fire
unquenchable,’ if I may borrow the expression of our great Milton. He
had not the correctness of language so striking in the great Roman
orator; but he had the _verba ardentia_, the bold, glowing words.”

Cato led victorious armies into the field, and proved himself an able
general; for in Rome the functions of the general and the statesman were
united in the person of the Consul.

It became not, however, the Secretary of State to lead armies in person;
but while Chatham administered the affairs of this country, “victory
crowned the British arms wherever they appeared, both on sea and land;
and the four years of the second administration of Mr. Pitt are four of
the most glorious years in the history of the eighteenth century.”[10]

In their retirement they were alike; for neither regarded with
complacency the pursuits of literature: they required some physical
activity in their very idleness, and gardening was the favourite
occupation of both. Cato displayed his disregard and even hatred for
literary refinement by advising the Senate to dismiss the Grecian
Ambassador Carneades promptly, lest his eloquence should corrupt the
Roman youth with a love for Greek learning and philosophy.

He cultivated his farm and garden with great skill, and wrote a work on
the subject, entitled “_De Rustica_.” Chatham was a landscape-gardener
of no mean pretensions. He assisted Lord Lyttelton in laying out the
celebrated park and grounds at Hagley; and Bishop Warburton eulogizes
his skill in gardening as inimitable, and far superior to that of the
professor Capability Brown. Not even obedience to the king’s mandate
could draw Chatham from his country retirement at Hayes.

Neither ever thought he had done serving his country while life lasted,
even when bodily health and strength were gone. At eighty-four years of
age Cato went on an embassy to Carthage; and Chatham, worn out by the
gout and wrapped in flannels, never neglected to take his seat in the
House and electrify it with his eloquence when any important question
affecting the interests of the country or the liberty of the subject
arose.

Notwithstanding their many virtues, they were both coarse-minded,
violent men; proud, self-willed, and regardless of the common
courtesies, and even decencies, of society. Both were perhaps indebted
for some of their fame to the successful practice of the vice which has
been happily designated as the deference paid to virtue.

It is not, therefore, only in the peculiar circumstances of his death,
that Chatham resembles Cato, with whom he has therein been frequently
compared.

It will be remembered that after Cato’s return from Carthage (the
inveterate enemy and most powerful rival of Rome), Cato, then in the
eighty-fifth year of his age, and the last year of his life, never spoke
in the Senate without expressing his conviction of the dangerous power
of Carthage, and concluding with the celebrated words “_Delenda est
Carthago_.” Chatham, when peace with America was proposed on terms which
he thought dishonourable to his country, expended his last strength in
opposing it, and fell, to survive but a few days, senseless on the floor
of the House of Lords.

Those who attribute to the founder of the Jesuits the characteristics of
that powerful Order, both over-estimate and calumniate the man, IGNATIUS
LOYOLA. He foresaw none of the power and eminence which his successors
would attain; he contemplated neither their conquests, their influence,
wealth, nor extensive domination.

The wounded soldier on his miserable pallet devising conquests over
Satan, composing his _Spiritual Exercises_, and framing his
celebrated _Constitutions_, contemplated for himself and his
followers a scene of action wholly different from that into which
they were finally—accidentally or Providentially, who shall
say?—determined. His ambition contemplated no worldly fame; he
sought not riches nor the applause of men. He proposed only to carry
the Christian warfare into the country of the infidel, and in
poverty and “perfect obedience to the Holy See” to rescue souls from
perdition. The original object of his Order was the noble one of
preaching the Gospel among the Mahometans, especially in the Holy
Land; and for this specific object, his _Spiritual Exercises_ and
his _Constitutions_ were composed, and his Order founded. It was for
this purpose that the Pope sanctioned the formation of the Society,
and its members were on the point of departure for Asia when war
broke out between the Turks and the Christians.

This unexpected event rendered their journey physically impossible, and
compelled the newly-sworn aspirants to fulfil their vows of perfect
obedience in some other direction, to be enjoined by the Head of the
Church. Thenceforth they remained in Europe, where the Reformation
afforded ample scope for their exertions, and where they only too
successfully combated with the new heresy instead of with the old
apostacy. The mind of Ignatius Loyola was swayed by none of the
characteristics of Jesuitism. His character was open, direct, fearless.
Physically active and wonderfully energetic, to conceive was to
determine; to determine was to act.

When his broken leg was set awry he only said, “Break it again and set
it straight;” still the bone protruded and threatened to spoil the shape
of his boot: “Cut off the projection and stretch the limb in an iron
jack,” was a command which showed the unflinching determination of the
man.

Confined to his bed, the “Lives of the Saints” is brought to him for his
amusement. He is struck with their sufferings for the faith, and, on the
instant, determines to do likewise. Thenceforth his whole soul has but
one ambition, to suffer for the faith; and this ambition actuated the
remainder of his life. To run through the life of Ignatius, to pourtray
his fearful sufferings; his degrading servitude in misery, in beggary,
and rags; his unwearying perseverance in acquiring a knowledge of
language and divinity; his journeyings; his rebuffs; his trials; his
successes—would be to exhibit what can be effected by mere perseverance
and physical energy, without the gift of great mental powers.

But the peculiarly remarkable physical bias of Ignatius’s mind is still
more strikingly developed in his writings. Other men have been equally
active and persevering—other men have equalled him in mere bodily
activity and suffering; but to Ignatius alone belongs the discovery of
exercising the mind by converting his thoughts into actual realities,
and rendering the creations of the imagination true existences.

Herein appears the peculiarly physical tone of his mind, which could not
rest content with mere spiritual contemplation, but must actually, as it
were, see, feel, smell, taste, and hear the objects contemplated. The
_Spiritual Exercises_ enjoin that the exercitant must, in his gloomiest
hours, not only think upon, but actually _behold_, the vast
conflagration of Hell; he must _hear_ its wailings, shrieks, and
blasphemies; he must _smell_ its smoky brimstone, and the horrid stench
of its filth and rottenness; he must _taste_ the saltness of the tears
of penitence, and the bitterness of the rancour of the heart, and the
loathsomeness of the worm of conscience; and he must _touch_ the very
fire by which the souls of the reprobate are scorched. Thus each
meditation must be, not mere thinking-on, or contemplation, but must be
instinct with life—must be continued until the senses seem actually to
see, taste, and feel the objects contemplated.

So, in contemplating the passion of our Lord, the horrors of his death
must be visibly present; we must _hear_ his last words; we must _listen_
to the shoutings of the populace; we must _watch_ the agony of the
virgin-mother beholding the infamy of her blessed son; we must _see_ his
quivering limbs, his death-like paleness, his tottering weakness under
the burden of the cross, his bleeding side and pierced extremities.
Merely to see these things in contemplation is trivial and inessential;
we must, with certain interior senses, actually see, hear, taste, and
smell, not only the personages and scenes on which the mind is dwelling,
but the emotions which the scenes are calculated to excite. So again, we
must taste and relish the suavity and lusciousness of the pious soul,
and by a like internal sense of touch we must actually feel and kiss the
very garments, places, and footsteps of the personages whose acts our
minds dwell upon.

This is justly called “the application of the senses” to the soul.

It consists, in fact, in reducing to _quasi_-materialisms the visions of
the mind; in giving to the exercitant’s thoughts, every reality short of
such an actual-material existence as would render them visible to
others—as they are, indeed, visible to himself.

In this remarkable system for exciting the soul appears the utter
incapacity of the mind of Ignatius to appreciate mere metaphysical
activity. His soul could not apprehend the unseen, and dwell on the
absent or far distant. It was necessary to his frame of mind that
everything should be present, visible, tangible, real.

The soul of the founder of the Jesuits was, therefore, strikingly
accordant with the revelation of his physiognomy; although, were it
true, that he was—in the vulgar sense—a Jesuit, the Greek Nose and
generally a more delicate caste of countenance, would more correctly
have pourtrayed his inner man.

But the founder of the Jesuits was no Jesuit, and had his original
_Constitutions_ been adhered to, the Order would never have achieved the
bad eminence which it so rapidly attained, so long held, so quickly
lost, and so tenaciously still aspires after.


As by far the majority of persons have compound Noses, and as their
consideration will therefore throw additional light upon the system, we
shall add a few observations upon some of them.

The Roman Nose may be compounded with Classes II and III, rarely with
IV; seldom or never with V and VI.[11]


Compound I⁄II,—the Romano-Greek Nose.[12]

The following are instances of Noses of this sub-class:—

                       Alexander the Great.
                       Constantine.
                       Wolsey.
                       Richelieu.
                       Ximenes.
                       Lorenzo de’ Medici.
                       Frederick II. of Prussia.
                       Alfred.
                       Sir W. Raleigh.
                       Sir P. Sidney.
                       Napoleon.

Associated with much physical energy (I), these persons all exhibited
much refinement of mind, a love for Arts and Letters, considerable
astuteness and capacity of scheming; (II) they saw far and quickly,
though deficient in deep philosophical powers of thought.

A rather more extended notice of some of the members of the sub-classes
will be requisite; as, of course, their characters were less developed,
and therefore less known, than those of the pure classes; but
principally in order to point out the more minute touches, and,
apparently, inconsistencies of character which illustrate the compound
form of Nose.

[Illustration:

  CONSTANTINE.

  (_From a gem in the Florentine Museum._)
]

CONSTANTINE, having by a felicitous union of enterprise and cunning
procured his elevation to the Imperial throne, and having defeated the
last of his rivals to that splendid dignity, directed his attention to
the concentration rather than the extension of his enormous empire, and
sought, by building Constantinople, to divert the minds of the people
from foreign war and intestine discord; while he at the same time
fostered and encouraged the arts by the magnificent decoration of the
new capital, to which he brought from Asia and Greece some of their most
splendid productions.

Vigorous in war and active in peace, Constantine united all the
characteristics of the Roman and the Greek. In war he successfully
opposed both civil and foreign enemies, and made himself master of the
most extended empire Rome had ever designated by her name. While in the
vigour of his age, he moved with slow dignity, or with active vigilance,
according to the various exigencies of peace and war, along the
frontiers of his extensive dominions, and was always prepared to take
the field either against a foreign or a domestic enemy.

But when he had gradually reached the summit of prosperity and the
decline of life, he became sensible of the ambition of founding a city
which might perpetuate the glory of his name, and he then exhibited all
the capacities for the enjoyment of the luxuries of peace which had
hitherto lain dormant in his mind. The mere building and fortifying a
city, which would have satisfied the ambition of the coarser-minded
Roman, was not his ambition only. He desired to decorate it with the
highest efforts of human genius, and make it not only a monument of his
military prowess, but also of his taste and refinement. For this purpose
he founded schools of architecture to supply the disparity which his
fine taste detected between the degenerate artists of his time and those
of early Greece. The immortal productions of Phidias and Lysippus were
dragged from other countries to adorn his capital; and, unmindful of the
injustice, he despoiled the cities of Greece and Asia of their most
valuable ornaments. The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of
religious veneration, the most finished statues of the gods and heroes,
of the sages and poets of ancient times, contributed to the splendid
triumph of Constantinople.[13]

The character of WOLSEY was very similar to that of Constantine. We
might almost venture to assert that had he been placed in the same
situation he would have pursued the same course. Yet the only part of
their physiognomies which assimilates are their Noses. One remarkable
circumstance in the early life of each identifies the two men, and
exhibits in them the union of energy with acute tact. Constantine, half
assured of his elevation to the Imperial throne, if he could join his
father’s army and be present with him in case of his death, and having
with difficulty obtained permission to visit his father from Galerius,
(who dreaded the same event, and delayed the permission, until he
believed it would be impossible for him to accomplish his object),
travelled post through Bithynia, Dacia, Thracia, Pannonia, Italy and
Gaul, with such speed that he reached Boulogne in the very moment when
his father was preparing to embark for Britain, accompanied him, and
finally, by military election, succeeded to his share of the Empire.

When Henry VII was looking out in his old age for a rich wife, he
despatched Wolsey, to whom the vista of future eminence was just
opening, to Flanders, to treat for the hand of a Princess of the Empire.
Wolsey, conscious that in such affairs old age brooks no delay, started
on his journey and had returned before the King knew that he was gone.
By similar energy and shrewd scheming in pursuit of his own
aggrandizement, very analogous to that by which Constantine secured the
purple, Wolsey elevated himself to the highest subordinate station in
his country, and then directed his mind rather to the extension of
learning, the encouragement of art, the erection of splendid buildings,
and the increase of domestic magnificence, than to an imitation of the
warlike pursuits of the ancestors of his monarch; although the
disposition of the latter strongly tended in that more physically
energetic direction. The noble hall and chapel at Hampton Court and the
remains of the colleges which Wolsey founded, still attest his
magnificence, his taste, his liberality, and his respect for learning.

RICHELIEU was another Wolsey. It is a remarkable fact that the point of
identity in actively seeking their own aggrandizement, which has been
noticed between Wolsey and Constantine, occurs also in the early life of
Richelieu. Having, from interested motives, abandoned the army (for
which he was originally destined) for the Church, and the Pope having
refused, on account of his extreme youth, to sanction his elevation to
the Bishopric for the sake of which he had taken orders, he resolved to
overcome this difficulty in person; and setting off for Rome, gave the
Pontiff such convincing proofs of his talents, that he was consecrated
Bishop forthwith, at twenty-two years of age, and thus laid the
foundation of his future eminence.

He conducted in person the siege of Rochelle, and baffled the finest
military geniuses of Europe; he out-intrigued the ablest diplomatists;
he nourished arts and commerce, and for the better promotion of learning
he founded the French Academy.

In the union of energy of character and refinement of tastes the three
celebrated Cardinal-ministers of England, France, and Spain, strongly
assimilated.

The anecdotes which have been related of the energetic carving-out of
their own fortunes by Constantine, Wolsey, and Richelieu, find also
their parallel in the early career of XIMENES. The son of noble parents,
but without wealth or patronage, he had nothing but his talents and the
energy of his character to carry him successfully through life. He began
as a student at Salamanca; but finding that sphere too limited for his
ambition, he undertook a journey to Rome, where he soon distinguished
himself as an advocate, but preferring the church, took holy orders.

Sixtus IV had bestowed upon him the reversionary grant of the first
benefice which should fall vacant in Spain. This proved to be Uceda;
and, on the demise of the incumbent, he produced his letters, and took
possession with such promptitude and despatch that he baffled the
Archbishop of Toledo, who considered the benefice to be in his gift, and
had promised it to one of his dependents.

Like Richelieu he took the field in person, and in spite of the jealousy
of the King, the dissensions of the generals, and the mutiny of the
soldiers, he succeeded in taking the town of Oran on the coast of
Barbary; the first success of any moment which the Spanish army could
boast in a campaign of four years’ duration.

He devoted himself, in after-life, to the encouragement of popular
education and the advancement of higher learning in no less degree than
his brother Cardinals before named. He founded a school for the
education of the daughters of the poorer nobility, and subsequently
provided them with marriage-portions.

He established the University of Alcala, richly endowed it, and filled
its professorial chairs with the most distinguished learned men of
Europe. Here he undertook the magnificent work, known as the
Complutensian Bible. It was the first Polyglott Bible ever published,
and as such affords a striking contrast to the otherwise undeviating
opposition which Spain has offered to the spread of true Christianity
and the circulation of the Scriptures.

It should, however, be remembered that even this was a sealed book to
the laity, since it did not comprise a version in the vernacular. It
contained the Old Testament in the Hebrew, the Septuagint, the Vulgate
of St. Jerome, and the Chaldee Paraphrase with Latin translations, and
the New Testament in the Greek and Vulgate.

It was the work of fifteen years, and when the last volume was brought
to Ximenes, shortly before his death, he exclaimed: “Many high and
difficult matters have I carried on for the state, yet is there nothing
which I have done, that deserves higher congratulations than this
edition of the Scriptures—the fountain-head of our holy religion, whence
may flow purer streams of theology than those which have been turned off
from it.” The whole cost of the work, fifty thousand gold crowns, was
defrayed by Ximenes.

In LORENZO DE’ MEDICI we meet with another of those characters, frequent
among men eminent in public affairs, which unite refinement of taste
with physical energy. To live in the world’s eye with success, it is
necessary to exhibit something _ad captandum vulgus_. There must either
be the intense energy of the Roman, or the more moderate energy with the
taste and magnificence of the Romano-Greek. Hence, while the former
class of Nose prevails among those who have won fame and honours by arms
merely, the latter is frequent among those who are chiefly celebrated
for their statesmanship. But both energy and statesmanship were
necessary to him who would secure a world’s fame as ruler of a petty
Italian state. The head of a state too weak to be feared in war, and too
turbulent to be governed in calm tranquillity, required some other
qualities beside energy, in order to be respected and honoured by his
contemporaries. These qualities were happily united in Lorenzo de’
Medici. Firm in danger, prompt in action, lavish in expenditure, refined
in taste, accomplished in learning, expert in art, he was every way
formed to win laurels in an age which boasted the greatest statesmen,
the best artists, and the most profound scholars. The vigour and
promptitude with which he repelled the celebrated conspiracy of the
Pazzi family, hanged an Archbishop on the spot in full canonicals, and
punished the conspirators, alone attest his energy. The title of
Magnificent, which he earned in an age celebrated for its magnificence,
demonstrates his lavish liberality; while his love for antiquities, his
patronage of the arts of sculpture and painting, his studious devotion
to learning and the writings of the ancients, bespeak the refinement of
his mind. Among other institutions he founded a school for the study of
antiquities, and furnished it with the finest specimens of ancient
workmanship. “To this institution, more than to any other circumstance,
we may, without any hesitation, ascribe the sudden and astonishing
proficiency, which, towards the close of the fifteenth century, was
evidently made in the arts, and which, commencing at Florence, extended
itself to the rest of Europe.”

“‘It is highly deserving of notice,’ says Vasari, ‘that all those who
studied in the gardens of the Medici, and were favoured by Lorenzo,
became most excellent artists, which can only be attributed to the
exquisite judgment of this great patron of their studies.’”[14]

FREDERICK II is another example of the union of refined tastes with
vigorous energy. It is not so much for his military genius that he is to
be remembered and respected, as for the impulse he gave to Prussian
intellect, and thence generally to German mind.

It is true this was hardly perceptible till the present century, for
until the peace of 1815, Germany had been the seat of almost incessant
warfare, and was, therefore, disabled from pursuing the arts of peace
with success. But thirty years’ peace has enabled her to perform great
things, and to justify a pretty sure hope of yet greater. We ought to be
far in advance of her, for where she now is we were exactly two hundred
and fifty years and upwards ago. Till the reign of Elizabeth, England
had been, like Germany till 1815, the seat of perpetual war or religious
discord. At the end of the sixteenth century in England, and at the
beginning of the nineteenth in Germany, the Teutonic mind began to
develope itself with effect. The same deep investigations in history,
the same subtle disquisitions in metaphysics, the same love of
philological criticism that distinguished English literature in the
early part of the seventeenth century, belong to German literature in
the nineteenth, and are combined with the same coarseness of manners
that marked our ancestors. The Germans still delight in those rude,
indecent productions, called Miracle-plays or Mysteries,[15] which
amused the predecessors of Shakspere: a written character, ugly,
uncouth, and elsewhere obsolete; the recent adoption of the vernacular
in literary composition;[16] legalized wager of battle; semi-feudalism;
masques of fools dancing in a gigantic beer-barrel and chanting the
praises of beer; deer-battues; perpetual duelling and beer-swigging;
feasts of horse-flesh; millions pilgrimaging to the Coat of Treves; the
implicit reception of sham miracles, all mark a state of society little
removed from that magnificent barbarism which stained the rush-strewn
court of the ear-boxing and swearing Elizabeth.

In refinement, and that wealth which springs from Science, we have
advanced far beyond Germany; but in that wealth which emanates from Mind
we are only on a par with her. The causes of this will be considered
more fully hereafter, when we treat, under Class III, of the causes of
the decline of Wisdom.

The impulse given to German Mind may in a great measure be attributed to
the pains which Frederick II took to civilise and educate his people.
For this purpose he founded numerous popular schools, it is said as many
as sixty in one year. He instituted an Academy of Sciences and fostered
Universities. He patronized Commerce and the Arts, and by his wise
administration as much as by his military talents raised Prussia to the
rank of a second-rate European State. The military success of the
correspondent of Voltaire, it is unnecessary to do more than refer to.

Machiavellism formed a strikingly distinctive feature in the characters
of all the foregoing personages. They all possessed more of the wisdom
of the serpent, than of the innocence of the dove. It may be thought,
however, that we employ too strong a term in calling this Machiavellism.
A less strict morality would only call it policy, worldly wisdom. In men
of strong conscientiousness, astuteness may be little or nothing more;
but where the moral sense is weak, it easily passes into duplicity and
dishonest craft.

The shrewd policy and worldly wisdom by which the great ALFRED civilized
a barbarous people, and tamed to quietude a nation of turbulent robbers,
has never been accused of departing from a strict morality. It may be
that he is somewhat indebted to the partiality of the monkish historians
for the very flattering pictures of him handed down to us. The prompt
and energetic manner in which, from time to time, he fell upon and
defeated the Danes who ravaged the country is too well known to need
mention, and the prudent means by which he endeavoured to incite his
people to educate themselves has been often the subject of praise. In a
remarkably illiterate age, he alone courted literature, and, conscious
of its power to civilize his people, urged them to follow his example.
Nevertheless, he did not forget the more arduous duties of a King. While
devoting a large part of his time to learning, he never neglected the
interests of his country; nor suffered her liberties to be trampled upon
by invaders while he was cultivating the arts of peace. His biographer,
quaintly and somewhat poetically, describes the King’s studious mind and
gubernatorial talents. “Like a most productive bee, he flew here and
there asking questions as he went, until he had eagerly and unceasingly
collected many various flowers of Divine Scripture, with which he
thickly stored the cells of his mind. His friends would voluntarily
sustain little or no toil, though it was for the common necessity of the
kingdom; but he alone, sustained by the divine aid, like a skilful
pilot, strove to steer his ship laden with much wealth, into the safe
and much-desired harbour of his country though almost all his crew were
tired, and suffered them not to faint or hesitate, though sailing among
the manifold waves and eddies of this present life.”[17]

The circumstances in which men are involuntarily placed marvellously
affect their actions. Crowd together a number of young trees in one
small plot, and how slowly they grow, how stunted they become! Remove
them to separate stations, where their roots may spread, their branches
expand, and their leaves drink freely of the sun and air, and how soon
they take their place among the giants of the forest. So it is with men.
Crowded in cities, undistinguished by birth, and unassisted by
patronage, many a hero dies unseen and unnoticed—

           “Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast,
           The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
           Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
           Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.”

Let it not, therefore, be imagined, from the foregoing instances, that
every Greco-Roman Nose indicates an energetic statesman, or a literary
monarch; or that the same actions are to be predicated from the same
form of Nose in different men under different circumstances.

Energy and refinement may exist in every department of life. The peasant
may furnish as illustrious an example of either as the Prince. But what
a King has, these heroes want; and so they die unhonoured for lack of a
record. The illustrations are, therefore, necessarily drawn from the
high and mighty of various spheres.

Stars of lesser magnitude, however, present themselves to shed a further
light upon the subject.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH and SIR PHILIP SIDNEY were two men whose characters
exhibited many points of identity.

In any arduous enterprize which promised fame and honour, Sir Walter
Raleigh was always prominent. Eager to support the Reformation, he
served in the Protestant army as a volunteer during the civil wars in
France, and afterwards tendered his services to the Netherlands in their
contest with Spain for civil and religious liberty. One of the most
attractive enterprizes of the reign of Elizabeth to men of energy and
forethought was, however, that presented by the recently-opened field of
American discovery. Into this Raleigh threw himself heart and soul. With
his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, he made the then perilous voyage
to the New World, but failed to establish a firm footing on its shores.

Still he was not to be thus foiled. After a careful consideration of the
best authorities, he came to the just conclusion that there was land
north of the Gulf of Florida, a tract then wholly unexplored. Having
obtained from the Queen the inexpensive grant of all he might discover,
be it sea or be it land, be it inhabited or be it void, he fitted out
vessels of discovery; and, though not permitted by the wary Queen to
accompany them himself, they verified his predictions by discovering the
country now called Virginia—a name which the virgin Queen herself
bestowed upon it.

But it was not by his energy that Raleigh alone distinguished himself.
The young Protestant volunteer, and the American adventurer would long
since have been forgotten among a host of compeers, had not he presented
far higher claims to the notice of posterity. “Raleigh was one of those
rare men who seem qualified to excel in all pursuits alike; and his
talents were set off by an extraordinary _laboriousness_, and _capacity_
of application. (I⁄II). As a navigator, soldier, statesman, and
historian, his name is intimately and honourably linked with one of the
most brilliant periods of British history.”[18]

Sir Walter Raleigh occupies a distinguished place in literature, both as
a poet and an historian. It is probable that only a small portion of his
poetry has come down to us. He seems to have regarded it but lightly
himself, and many very beautiful pieces, which there is no reason to
doubt owe their origin to his creative brain, are without name, and only
preserved in some obscure miscellaneous collections, under the modest
signature ‘Ignoto.’ One of these, sometimes entitled “The Lie,” and
sometimes “The Soul’s Errand,” is as beautiful, as Christian, and as
philosophic a poem as any in the language; yet so little pains did he
take to secure to himself the literary fame of the words with which he
had relieved his labouring soul, that it has been attributed to divers
poetasters, and, among others, to that most wretched inharmonious
scribe, Joshua Sylvester.

Spenser eulogizes Raleigh’s poetic powers as those of one

                “... as skilful in that art as any.”[19]

He likewise entitles him ‘the summer’s nightingale,’ and hints that he
had in store a poem on Queen Elizabeth, which might rival “The Faerie
Queene:”—

        “To taste the streames, that like a golden showre,
        Flow from thy fruitful head, of thy Love’s praise—
        Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre—
        When so thee list thy lofty Muse to raise;
          _Yet till that thou thy poem wilt make known_,
          Let thy faire Cynthia’s praises be thus rudely shown.”

But poetic effusions are not the only contributions of Raleigh to
literature. During his long confinement in the Tower, on charge of
treason, he relieved his solitude by compiling a “History of the World;”
an undertaking sufficient to appal the most active and learned man under
the most favourable circumstances, but which appears something
superhuman when attempted and almost accomplished by a wretched prisoner
lying under an unjust sentence of death.

This History commences at the Creation, and descends as far as the end
of the second Macedonian War; when, in consequence of the death of
Prince Henry, for whose instruction it was intended, he ceased from his
arduous labours. The work displays a vast extent of reading in history,
philosophy, theology, and Rabbinical learning.

Like Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney combined the characters of the warrior
and the author. His Arcadia was a work of poetic prose, better suited to
the time in which he lived than to any subsequent period, and is almost
forgotten; and the stiffness and hard formality of his poetry has almost
sunk it in like oblivion. A writer who is not an author for all time,
may be a very useful and agreeable one in his day, but lacks power and
thoughtfulness. It is only those who have the “one touch of Nature”
which “makes the whole world kin,” that are independent of time, and
live with the kindred spirits of all ages.

Time puts out the lesser lights which burn only to light some small
apartment and corner of the world, but cannot extinguish the suns which
are formed to illuminate the whole earth.

Sir Philip Sidney was rather a discerning patron of letters than a man
of letters. He was the first patron and friend of Spenser, whom he
introduced to the Queen, and their friendship endured till Sidney’s
lamented death. Perhaps in the whole range of literary history, there is
no incident so beautiful as the mutual friendship and familiar
intercourse of Raleigh, Spenser, and Sidney. This pleasing friendship is
frequently alluded to by Spenser. The ‘Faerie Queene’ is dedicated to
Raleigh, whose return from his Western Expedition is celebrated in the
Pastoral, entitled, “Colin Clout’s come home again;” from which we learn
that it was their custom to recline

                 “... amongst the coolly shade
               Of the green alders by the Mulla’s shore,”

and recite to each other their poetic effusions.

How beautiful a picture of the simplicity of great minds! It strikes us
as a more lovely picture than the much-admired one of Chaucer, solitary
among the daisies of the Woodstock meadows.

Sidney inspired Spenser with no mere mercenary friendship, the affection
of the client for his patron’s substantial marks of favour. When death
smote Sidney on the sad field of Zutphen, Spenser invoked every Muse to
weep over his untimely fall, and celebrated his virtues in the beautiful
elegy “The Tears of the Muses for Astrophel.” It will perhaps relieve
the dryness of our subject, to observe that the first poetical use of
the Forget-me-not, (_Myosotis palustris_) as a symbol of faithfulness,
occurs in this poem, and the English reader may there find a more
fitting reason to esteem this little flower than the absurd German
legend of a drowning knight throwing a spray of it to his ladye-love.

The Astrophel of the following lines from Spenser’s Elegy, is Sidney;
Stella is the name by which Sidney addressed his Mistress, who, it is
feigned, was unable to survive his loss, and,

            “... followed her mute, like turtle chaste,
          To prove that death their hearts cannot divide,
          Which, living, were in love so firmly tied.

          The Gods which all things see, this same beheld;
          And pittying this paire of lovers trew,
          Transformed them, there lying on the field,
          Into one flowre, that is both red and blew.
            It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade,
            Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made.

          And in the midst thereof a starre appeares,
          As fairly formed as any starre in skyes,
          Resembling Stella in her freshest yeeres,
          Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes
            And all the day it standeth full of deow,
            Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow.

          That hearb of some, Starlight is call’d by name,
          Of others, Penthia, though not so well;
          But thou, whenever thou dost find the same,
          From this day forth doe call it Astrophel.
          And whensoever thou it up doost take,
          Doe pluck it softly for that shepheard’s sake.”

May the injunction of the last lines never be forgotten by any one who
knows that the Forget-me-not is associated with the friendship of two
such noble-minded men!

It is hardly necessary to say that Sir Philip Sidney fell gallantly
fighting at the battle of Zutphen, or to narrate the interesting
anecdote of his refusing a drink of cold water till a wounded soldier
had partaken of it, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine;”
thus nobly displaying both firm endurance (I.) and sensitive humanity
(II.)

The other instances, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, and NAPOLEON, may be best
treated of by contrasting them with their opposites; and we shall thus
be enabled to illustrate, at the same time, both the Roman and the Greek
Noses more fully. Moreover, while the contrast will clearly demonstrate
the distinctive characteristics of those Noses, it will also evince how
important it is to attend to compound forms, and how materially the
character is affected by the intermixture of classes.

Of all the conquerors whose wild ambition has stained with blood the
page of History, Alexander and Napoleon alone fought from a high
romantic motive—the desire of eternal fame. By virtue of a large share
of the Roman Nose, they pursued their favourite and chosen career with
determined energy and a reckless disregard for the lives of others;
nevertheless, being strongly gifted with the Greek, they might in some
other sphere have been high artists of some class; but having the sword
in their hands, they pursued intellectual fame by its means.

It is difficult to say whether the Roman or the Greek form predominates
in their Noses; for they are perhaps as much Greco-Roman as
Romano-Greek; but as they were warriors, we place them here because it
will be advantageous to draw an illustrative contrast between their
characters and Noses, and the characters and Noses of too many other
mere conquerors, whose Noses have been purely Roman.

Let us briefly contrast Julius Cæsar and Alexander. They were both, in
the prime of life, placed at the head of a large empire, firmly seated,
with a large army and all the world open to their grasp. Their Noses
alone differed. Alexander, while pursuing everlasting fame by his arms,
and earning what was then deemed the highest glory, steadily devoted
himself to the extension of scientific knowledge. Under his revered
master Aristotle, he acquired much learning, and, when he ascended his
father’s throne, devoted his arms as much to the conquest of the then
unknown realms of science as of the kingdoms of the earth. His army was
always accompanied by learned men, whose sole duty it was to investigate
the history, religion, and arts of the countries he passed through, to
collect rare animals and plants, statues, coins, and objects of art or
curiosity to be transmitted to Greece for the study of his master
Aristotle. It has been well said, “If there had been no Alexander, there
would have been no Aristotle.” We do not laud the man who sought glory
by the destruction of others, but merely assert that, as these acts
prove, his motive to arms was a high intellectual one, and consistent
with the compound character of his Nose.

[Illustration:

  JULIUS CÆSAR.
]

[Illustration:

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
]

                (_From gems in the Florentine Museum._)

Look at Julius Cæsar on the other hand. Under similar circumstances,
what was his ambition? To make himself imperial master of Rome, and to
subject his fellow-citizens for his own personal aggrandizement. His
thoughts never extended beyond his own immediate existence. Posterity
never entered into his calculations. Unlike his successor
Augustus—though he had greater facilities if he had been less sensually
ambitious—he patronised no art—literary or scientific. His one idea was
self, without one refinement or softening alloy. Granted that
Alexander’s ambition was also selfish, there was yet this difference
between them; the one (Cæsar) sought only his _present personal_ and
_sensuous_ profit; the other (Alexander) laboured to earn “a name on
History’s page to make him ‘GREAT.’” The one was the common prose, the
other the epic poem. The one sacrificed his fame to himself, the other
himself to his fame; and the world has recognized and recorded this
distinction: for while the one is remembered as “the enslaver of his
country,” the other is immortalized as “the Great.”

A similar contrast may be drawn between the characters and noses of the
two modern heroes, Napoleon and Wellington. Like Alexander and Cæsar,
the only point in which their characters assimilate is their warrior,
physical energy; and this exhibits itself in whatever is Roman in their
Noses. In all other respects they are diametrically opposite; the Nose
of Wellington being purely (almost in excess) Roman; while Napoleon’s
partakes largely of the refining qualities of the Greek.

To describe the character of Napoleon would be to repeat what we have
said of Alexander; for whether the similarity was accidental, or arose
from mental conformity (their Noses were remarkably alike), or was
intentionally imitative on the part of the former,[20] it is certainly
most striking.

Ambition of future fame was far more the ruling passion of Napoleon than
lust of present power. His mind, with all its imperfections and
meannesses (as whose is without?), was too noble to be satisfied with
mere personal aggrandizement.

All the great mistakes of his life were occasioned by his obedience to
the passion for future fame. When swayed by the mere desire of power,
all his acts were successful. But when he saw all Europe (except one
little pugnacious island) lying helpless at his feet, he began to
revolve schemes which could not enhance, but might risk, his personal
power. Then he attempted to realize his long-cherished dream of Eastern
conquest—a conquest not to be held, but to be overrun; a conquest like
that of Alexander, Nadir Shah, or Zinghis Khan. Often did he exclaim,
“the seat of all fame is the east.” To realize this empty fame, he took
the false step of invading Egypt. Foiled there, he still hoped to
penetrate Asia by land, and gathered all his strength to overwhelm
Russia, his last and greatest error. They greatly err who think these
were mere schemes to keep France embroiled, lest peace should annihilate
his power. They equally err who ridicule and attribute to a childish
vanity his ambition to link himself by marriage with the imperial
families of Europe. It was no childish vanity, but a politic endeavour
to found a dynasty, which should hand down his name as its founder to
the latest ages. They again who can see nothing better in the melancholy
spectacle of Napoleon at St. Helena, engaged in falsifying records and
altering figures to deceive the world, than a drivelling vanity, utterly
miscomprehend the man. Fame, fame to the utmost limits of human
duration, was to his last moment his highest ambition. Foiled in
everything else, he yet hoped to secure fame. He knew that under his
name the most eventful page in the History of Europe, since the fall of
Rome, must be written, and he naturally desired

          “To be among the worthies of renown,
            And so sit fair with fame, with glory bright.”

                                                      DANIEL.

To describe the character of Wellington, is to reverse that of Napoleon.
Napoleon was shrewd, artful, and deceitful; Wellington open-hearted,
strong-sensed, candid, and sincere. Napoleon a clever statesman;
Wellington obtuse in politics. Napoleon a great strategist; Wellington
short-sighted, though daring in the field. Napoleon a lover and patron
of arts; Wellington a despiser of them. Napoleon said to be personally
timid; Wellington constitutionally brave. Napoleon’s cruelties were acts
of cool calculation and state-policy; Wellington’s of military fury.
Napoleon poisoned his sick troops because he did not know what else to
do with them, and murdered the Duke d’Enghien to produce “an effect” in
Europe; Wellington’s cruelties were the necessary consequences of war
energetically carried on, and were never the result of cold-blooded
predetermination.[21]

Before closing this section, we would request the reader’s attention
to the strong proof of the truth of the hypothesis derivable from
the fact that like Noses, with like circumstances (_cæteris
paribus_, as the phrenologists say), produce like characters: for
instance, Wolsey, Richelieu, Ximenes, Lorenzo di Medici,
Alfred:—Sidney, Raleigh:—Alexander, Napoleon.




                              CHAPTER III.
                           OF THE GREEK NOSE.

  CLASS II.—THE GREEK, or straight Nose, is perfectly straight; any
    deviation from a right line must be strictly noticed. If the
    deviation tend to convexity, it approaches the Roman, and the
    character is improved by an accession of energy; on the other hand,
    when the deviation is towards concavity, it partakes of the
    Celestial, and the character is weakened. It should be fine, and
    well chiselled, but not sharp.

  It indicates Refinement of character; love for the Fine Arts, and
    _Belles-Lettres_; astuteness, craft, and a preference for indirect
    rather than direct action. Its owner is not without some energy in
    pursuit of that which is agreeable to his tastes; but, unlike the
    owner of the Roman Nose, he cannot exert himself in _opposition_ to
    his tastes. When associated with the Roman Nose, and distended
    slightly at the end by the Cogitative, it indicates the most useful
    and intellectual of characters, and is the highest and most
    beautiful form which the organ can assume.


This Nose, like the Roman, takes its name from the people of whom it was
most characteristic—physically and mentally. On these two parallel facts
(with others of a like kind) much stress maybe justly laid, although
they are old and trite. But this very triteness is the proof of their
truth. It proves that the hypothesis which attributes certain mental
characteristics, well known to belong to the Romans, to the Roman
Nose,—and so of the Greeks to the Greek Nose, and of the Jews to the
Jewish Nose,—is founded in nature; and, so far from being a fanciful
invention, is a fact long recognized, and as old as the creation of the
human proboscis.

Requesting the reader to bear in mind the form of the Greek Nose and its
indications, we would remark how exactly the latter correspond with the
character of the ancient Greeks as a nation. It is unnecessary to
expatiate on their high excellence in art, their lofty philosophy, their
acute reasoning, or their poetical inspiration—these are known to every
school-boy. Their craftiness, their political falsehood, and shrewd
deceitfulness, were celebrated in ancient days as now, and “_Græcia
mendax_,” “_Danaûm insidiæ_,” were epithets as true and as commonly
applied in the time of Augustus, as at the present hour by modern
travellers. “_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!_” exclaims the cautious
Priest of Troy, referring to the well-known character of the treacherous
enemy. And what a contrast to anything recorded in Roman warfare does
the Trojan War itself exhibit! The Romans would have battered down the
walls with their furious engines; the wily Greeks invent a stratagem by
which the enemy pull down their own walls. If we may credit Homer—and,
if not for the facts, we may for his fine portraitures of Grecian
character—there was a vast deal more talking than fighting during the
ten years’ siege. There was plenty of the _morale_, but very little of
the _physique_, as a Frenchman would say. In truth, the contrast between
the Romans and the Greeks was as great in the latter as in the former.

The Greeks were no nation of hardy warriors, though they were always
quarrelling among themselves in petty battles which have won an
undeserved celebrity by the talents of their historians. Were it not for
the writings of Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War would rank no higher
than the border skirmishes of the Scots and Northumbrians, or the
expeditions of the Sioux and Pawnees. A simple geographical fact is
sufficient to prove this against all the moral power of the most glowing
and eloquent historian. Greece is about one-fourth less than Scotland,
and its recorded population was about the same. Is it possible that, in
such a corner, a war of seven-and-twenty years’ duration could have been
more than a series of skirmishes and predatory expeditions? More than
that must, in a much briefer space, have annihilated the whole
population. More than that, and at the end of twenty-seven years the
States of Greece must have been in the condition of the celebrated
Kilkenny cats, which fought till only the tip of the tail of one of them
was left. The battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, &c., against foreign
foes, rank higher, because they were fought and won under a high
intellectual inspiration, entirely consistent with Class II.—the love of
country. But with these battles the war ended; the Greeks did not, as
the Romans would have done, follow up the defeat of the enemy with a
counter-incursion into his country and an attempt at foreign conquest.
He was driven from their territory; their hearths were secure; their
gods replaced on their pedestals; their temples re-purified, and that
satisfied _their_ ambition. The Greeks made no foreign conquests;
boasted no extended empire. The wars of Alexander seem the only
exception; but of that Monarch himself we have already treated, and of
his battles it may be said, that they were not fought by Peloponnesian
Greeks (of whom we are now speaking) but by Macedonians and Asiatic
mercenaries; who were, in all probability—though it would demand a
volume on ethnography to prove it—a wholly different race.

But, if we were only prepared to substantiate our hypothesis by these
general facts of national characteristics, it would be very
unsatisfactory; as it is obvious that nothing could be easier than to
manufacture and support a theory by moulding it to a single general
fact. It is by the multiplicity of isolated _individual_ cases that the
hypothesis must stand or fall. And we are happily in a position again to
adduce these in its favour.

The following persons will, on an examination of their portraits, be
found to have possessed Greek Noses:—

                           Petrarch.
                           Milton (in youth).
                           Spenser.
                           Boccacio.
                           Canova.
                           Raffaelle.
                           Claude.
                           Rubens.
                           Murillo.
                           Titian.
                           Addison.
                           Voltaire.
                           Byron.
                           Shelley.

[Illustration:

  RAFFAELLE.
]

It will be perceived that this list (which, like all the others, might
be very much extended) contains the names of poets and artists of the
highest _beauty_ and elegance, though not of the most intense and
deepest _thought_. Beauty is their highest excellence, their chief
praise. Exquisite melody, ætherial fancies, felicitous expression, a
fine perception of the Beautiful, as distinguished from the Sublime,
whether on paper or canvass, (for it is only the difference in the
_mécanique_, or vehicle of expression, which constitutes the difference
between the Artist and the Poet), are their best attributes. Addison and
Voltaire are the only two of the above instances who never excelled in
Poetry or Art, though both assiduously courted the former Muse.
Nevertheless Addison is an illustrious instance in our behalf. Is not
the _beauty_, the correctness, the euphony of his style still an object
of emulation? Has it not for above a century been the model of good
writing? And yet it is too true that nothing equally permanent can be
found, which is at the same time so weak and tame in thought, so shallow
in reasoning, or so lax in argument. In fact, it owes all its permanency
to its euphony, its musical harmony and exactness of expression.

[Illustration:

  ADDISON.
]

The absence of a noticeable development of the Cogitative (Class III.)
accounts for the deficiency of higher qualities in these disciples of
the Beautiful. For this reason the Greek nose is more interesting in its
compound form, Sub-class II⁄III the “_Greco-Cogitative_,” than in its
simple form.

Of the above instances, Voltaire is the most decidedly deficient in the
Cogitative, which is always essential to indicate a capacity for the
deep, close and serious thought requisite to constitute a truly great
and philosophic mind. The angle at which his nose stood from his face
was quite 45°, and therefore much too great to exhibit faithfully the
higher characteristics of the Greek. It was, moreover, exceedingly
deficient in the broadening property of Class III; and we presume that
no one will assert that Voltaire possessed “a truly great and
philosophic mind.” Surely no man, who ever wrote so much, and on such
varied subjects, ever devoted less time to close intense thought. He did
not even stop to examine his facts; but, having a brilliant wit and “the
pen of a ready writer,” he rapidly evolved some fanciful theory, or
started some fallacious argument from such unauthenticated data as he
happened to be possessed of. All this was indicated by his sharp Greek
Nose; for it was acuteness, not depth; readiness, not thought; careless,
unprincipled wit, not study; attractive style, not sound matter, which
earned him his short-lived fame. Hence, Voltaire, though striving all
his life to gain the title of philosopher, never succeeded even in the
most unphilosophic age and country since the revival of learning, and is
now, we believe, wholly excluded from the dignity. It has been truly and
wittily said of Voltaire, that “he _half_ knew everything, ‘from the
cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out
of the wall,’ and he wrote of them all, and laughed at them all.”

It will be noticed that the foregoing list contains the name of “Milton,
_in youth_.” It is inserted thus, because his portrait, taken _ætat._
XXIII, shows that his Nose was not then developed into the Cogitative
form which it assumed in later years, when troublous times and anxious
cares caused him to reflect profoundly on events around him. Then it
expanded at the base and became, like the Noses of all the great men of
those stirring times, largely compounded with the Cogitative; under the
compounds of which class it will again, at a later period of his life,
appear. From this corresponding change in feature with change in
character, we might, if we thought proper, demand the same proof for our
system which the phrenologists demand for theirs, from the gradual
alteration in the skull of the boy Bidder; and though (as our system is,
we conceive, better based than theirs) it is unnecessary to lay as much
stress upon a single fact as they are compelled to do, yet we think it
right not to let this proof pass wholly without observation.

Having already treated at some length of the Romano-Greek Nose
(Sub-class I⁄II.), it is unnecessary to enlarge here upon its close ally
the Greco-Roman II⁄I. Of course they are somewhat similar in appearance
and character; only as in every compound form, one simple one will
generally prevail—Nature, like a bad cook, not always mixing her
ingredients in due proportions—it is necessary to distinguish them into
different sub-classes.

A noticeable predominance of one form will at once indicate to which
sub-class a Nose belongs, and the character will be found to be affected
accordingly. Thus a Romano-Greek Nose indicates a more energetic and
less refined character than a Greco-Roman. But these are the minutiæ of
the science, with which it is not advisable at present to embarrass the
reader.

[Illustration:

  BYRON.
]




                              CHAPTER IV.
                        OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE.

  CLASS III.—THE COGITATIVE, or Wide-Nostrilled Nose, is, as its
    secondary name imports, wide at the end, thick and broad, not
    clubbed, but _gradually_ widening from below the bridge. The other
    Noses are seen in profile, but this in full face.

  It indicates a Cogitative mind, having strong powers of Thought, and
    given to close and serious Meditation. Its indications are of course
    much dependent on the form of the Nose in profile, which decides the
    turn the Cogitative power will take. Of course it never occurs
    alone, and is usually associated with Classes I. and II. rarely with
    IV., still more seldom with V. and VI. The entire absence of it
    produces the “sharp” Nose, which is not classified, a sharpness is
    only a negative quality, being defect of breadth, and therefore
    indicates defect of Cogitative power.


It is manifest that without some portion of the Cogitative power, _i.
e._, the capacity of concentrating the thoughts earnestly and powerfully
in one focus, no character can be truly great. It is therefore a quality
essential to high and durable eminence in every department of life. It
matters not what a man’s natural talents may be, they will be utterly
useless, or worse than useless, if he has not schooled his mind into
habits of concentrated thought. It is the want of this severe training
which causes so many men of fine talents to be a burden to themselves
and others. How frequently have we to lament the humiliating spectacle
of a great genius—as the phrase is—flitting about from pursuit to
pursuit, without any settled end or aim; now attempting this thing, now
dabbling in that; doing all things tolerably well, but nothing
perfectly; aiming at everything, but holding fast to nothing; and merely
from want of steady settled habits of thought! How melancholy is it to
reflect that the want of self-training in early life has converted the
blessing of talents into a curse, and turned the fine wheat of heaven’s
planting into the rank tares of Hell!

It is from beholding this too frequent spectacle that dull-pated
Ignorance repeats with self-complacency the trite proverb, “Geniuses
rarely do any good for themselves,” professes to despise the talents in
which he is consciously deficient, and thanks God that He has not made
him a genius.

Begone, thou muddle-pated imbecile! and learn that it is not his genius
which has made him what he is, but the want of that in which you equally
fail—self-training. Instead of idly despising the noblest gifts of
Heaven, strive, from his example, to avoid the rock on which he has
split, and endeavour, by stern, close, severe mental discipline, to
elevate yourself to a fractional part of the high estate from which he
has fallen. Pull him not down to your debasement, but soar upward
towards the eminence which he has voluntarily (alas!) abandoned; well
assured that though _you_ may never reach it, your labour will not have
been in vain, but that you may yet place yourself far above the level of
the common despisers of genius.

But to our subject—the Cogitative Nose. This Nose long puzzled us. We
found it among men of all pursuits, from the warrior to the peaceful
theologian. Noticing it more particularly among the latter, we were at
one time inclined to call it the religious Nose; but further observation
convincing us that that term was too limited, we were compelled to
abandon it. We were next, from seeing it frequent among scientific men,
disposed to call it the philosophic Nose; but this was found to be too
confined also, as, in the modern acceptation of the term, it seemed to
exclude the theologians, and we moreover traced it accompanying other
and very different conditions of mind. It soon became manifest, however,
that it was noticeable only among very first-rate men (men of the very
_highest_ excellence in their several departments), and that search must
be made for some common property of mind which however directed by other
causes, would always lead to eminence. It appeared to us that this
property was deep, close Meditation, intense concentrated Thought,
eminently “cogitative” in fact; and, therefore, we adopted this term,
which permits to have included in it all serious thinkers, whatever the
subject of their cogitations.

It would be wrong to regard it as a mere coincidence, that, after having
from deduction _à posteriori_ learnt that this common property is
exhibited in the _breadth_ of the Nose, we find that if we were, _à
priori_, to consider in which part of the Nose a _common_ property was
to be looked for, we must decide it to be in the _breadth_, for the
profile is already in every part mapped out and appropriated to
_special_ properties.

May we not hail this as one of the beautiful harmonious truths which
spring up from time to time, the deeper the subject is investigated, to
attest the accuracy of the system? for where by a careful deduction, _à
posteriori_, we discover the common property is, there, _à priori_, we
perceive it must be in order to act in concert with the _special_
properties exhibited by the profile.

To entitle a Nose to rank among the Cogitatives, it should be above the
medium between the very full broad Nose, and the very sharp thin Nose.
The observation is to be confined to the parts _below_ the bridge; what
may be the properties of breadth _above_ the bridge we have not at
present observed satisfactorily. It may be remarked as a general rule,
that the further a Nose recedes from sharpness the better.

We have said that minds of every bias are found accompanying Cogitative
Noses, and this necessarily; for the tendency of the cogitations will be
determined by the profile. Thus the Cogitative acts in concert with the
other Noses, making useful those qualities which would, otherwise, for
ever slumber unknown. The very best Nose in profile may be utterly
worthless from defect of breadth; for, as before observed, no talent is
of any use without Cogitative power; and every Nose, having breadth as
well as length (profile), must be submitted to the test of this Class
before a judgment is pronounced upon it. Being, however, anxious to
simplify the subject, we have not, in our notices of Classes I. and II.,
remarked specially on the Cogitative part of their formation, and have
reserved until this chapter the instances of those Classes partaking
largely of Class III.

In the present brief sketch of the science, however, we shall not
attempt to distinguish our instances under the heads of distinct
profiles, as, Romano-Cogitative, Greco-Cogitative, &c.; but class
together all the compounds partaking sufficiently of the Cogitative form
to entitle them to a place among Cogitative Noses.


The following persons have Noses which largely partake of this important
formation:—

                            THEOLOGIANS.

                          Wickliff.
                          Luther.
                          Cranmer.
                          Knox.
                          Tyndale.
                          Fuller.
                          Hall, Bishop
                          Tillotson.
                          Baxter.
                          Bunyan.
                          Hooker.
                          Taylor, Jeremy
                          South.
                          Warburton.
                          Paley.
                          Stillingfleet.
                          Chalmers.
                          Priestley.
                          Wesley.
                          Hall, Robert


                            SCIENTIFIC MEN.

                          Hunter.
                          Jenner.
                          Galileo.
                          Dollond.
                          Caxton.
                          Bacon.
                          Whiston.
                          Delambre.
                          Wollaston.
                          Smeaton.
                          Newton.
                          Halley.
                          Banks, Sir Joseph
                          Watt.
                          Cartwright.
                          Cuvier.
                          Descartes.
                          Humboldt, Alex. Von


                              LAWYERS.

                          Erskine.
                          Blackstone.
                          Mansfield.
                          Hale.
                          Coke.
                          Somers.


                              ARTISTS.

                          Angelo, Michael
                          Hogarth.


                              POETS.

                          Homer.
                          Chaucer.
                          Tasso.
                          Jonson, Ben
                          Shakspere.
                          Milton (in age).
                          Molière.
                          Göethe.
                          Wordsworth.
                          Mrs. Hemans.
                          Burns.


                              STATESMEN
                                 AND
                            METAPHYSICIANS.

                          Cromwell, O.
                          Grotius.
                          Burke.
                          Franklin.
                          Johnson, Dr. S.
                          Mackintosh, Sir J.
                          Walpole.
                          Colbert.
                          Talleyrand.
                          Fox.
                          Coleridge.
                          Washington.
                          Hobbes.
                          De Witt.


                              HISTORIANS.

                          Selden.
                          Camden.
                          Usher, Archbishop
                          Clarendon.
                          Burnet, Bishop
                          Buchanan.
                          Hume.
                          Robertson.

[Illustration:

  HOOKER.
]

In the above instances every one is compounded with Class I, or II, or
both; and would be written I⁄III, or II⁄III, or I + II⁄III, or II +
I⁄III, according to the class or sub-class of profile to which it might
belong.

The list given is more extensive than usual; yet it might be much
extended, and should comprise all the greatest names in Theology,
Science, and Art.

It has been said, that “the form of the Nose in profile, decides the
turn which the Cogitative power will take.” Thus the Romano-Cogitative
will prefer to exercise its cogitativeness in the bustle of active life,
and Washington and Cromwell present remarkable proofs of the truth of
this assertion. Another striking instance is the energetic and fervent
John Knox, who bearded monarchs on their thrones, and lawless nobles in
their strongholds.

But we must again guard the reader against the assumption that energy of
character can only be displayed in physical action.

The energy of the Romano-Cogitative may display itself in a vigorous and
nervous style of literary composition, and so be distinguished from the
beauty and euphony indicated by the Greco-Cogitative. The former will
disregard style, if it interfere with the force and power of expression,
or weakens the vigour and terseness of an important paragraph; while the
latter will labour and polish his style till the sense is almost
obliterated, and little remains but a beautiful and melodious sound.

LUTHER, whose Nose was highly Roman, is an illustrious example that
Power and Energy may be displayed otherwise than in physical action, and
many other examples might be cited, were it necessary to substantiate a
proposition which every reader may confirm for himself by examination of
any accurately illustrated General Biography. But we cite Luther,
because he presents a contrast, both in feature and mind, to many other
men of the same nation, warm friends, ardently embarked in the same
cause, impressed with the same truths, and equally desirous to propagate
them for the enlightenment and salvation of their fellow-men.

In Luther we behold a man of intense Energy and undaunted Firmness;
bold, forward, ever rushing into action; attacking Falsehood everywhere;
volunteering his theses; challenging disputation; ever in wars of words,
regardless of danger; fearless of death, imprisonment, or torture;
reckless whom he offended—rather seeking to offend—careless of other’s
feelings; coarse, violent, and repulsive in language; indifferent in
what terms he propounded truth or exposed error. Thus did the intense
Energy, prompt Decision, and immovable Firmness, with the coarseness and
disregard to his own and others’ physical welfare, indicated by his
Roman Nose, display themselves in Luther, to his own detriment, the
sorrow of his friends, the loss of many adherents, and the
still-continued scoffs of the enemies and the censure of the friends of
the Reformation.

In contrast with the fully-developed Cogitativeness of the Noses of
Luther, Wickliff, Cranmer, and other leaders in the Reformation, may be
placed the Nose of a man who was called to take a prominent part in the
same movement, but whose deficiency in thoughtfulness and serious
determination paralyzed his usefulness, and flung him back into the
abyss of Romanism, from which his soul naturally revolted. We allude to
Erasmus. His nose was a sharp Greek nose, indicative of the refinement
and delicacy of mind which made him a Reformer in heart, and of the want
of cogitative power which disabled him from joining the good cause when
adherence to it called for serious enterprise and thoughtful energy. He
was content to be a Reformer in heart only, and thus became the lukewarm
enemy of both Romanists and Protestants. He lashed the vices and follies
of the monks in sharp satires; but he shrunk from interference when the
intensely energetic and Roman-Nosed Luther would have annihilated them.

The historian of the Reformation thus describes him.[22] “In the result
Erasmus knew not on which side to range himself. None pleased him, and
he dreaded all. ‘It is dangerous to speak,’ said he, ‘and dangerous to
be silent.’ In all great religious movements there are such undecided
characters—respectable in some things, but hindering the truth, and who,
from a desire to displease no one, displease all.” Erasmus, though a
clever and learned man, lacked the wisdom and sagacity necessary to
penetrate the future. He could criticize a Greek historian, and correct
the Greek Testament, but he could not discern the signs of the times.
Timid and retiring by nature, he feared to fail in the contest with the
spirits of darkness; he had no confidence in the righteousness of the
cause of the Reformation, and, knowing his constitutional weakness,
shrunk from the penalties of failure. A sagacity and power of
penetration equal to that of his more cogitative brother-Reformers would
have cured his cowardice by shewing him its causelessness. Luther, on
the other hand, feared nothing; he knew that the truth, if energetically
urged, must prevail,—though it would be crushed, if permitted to lie
quietly dormant. Truth will not conquer of its own force; it must be
promulgated, insisted on, and brought home to men’s minds. They will not
seek it, preferring rather to enjoy the peaceable stagnation of error.
While Luther was respected and admired even by his bitterest enemies,
Erasmus was despised by all parties. His vacillation was aptly hit off
by a cotemporary, who, in one of his works depicting two heavens, the
Papal and the Christian, says, “I find Erasmus in neither; but perceive
him incessantly wheeling, in never-ending eddies between both.”
Certainly a fitting destination for the man who advises his friend to
dissemble his opinions, as a certain dying man eluded the devil. The
devil asked him what he believed? The dying man, fearing to be surprised
into some heresy, answered, “What the Church believes.” “What does the
Church believe?” persisted his Satanic enemy. “What I believe,” replied
the cautious man. Again, the devil, “And what do you believe?” “What the
Church believes.” Whereupon the devil, being unable to convict him of
lax Churchism, left him to the mercy of the Pope, who, he knew, would
deal with him after his—gifts for _pious uses_.

If the pencil of the Artist be the adopted vehicle of thought, the
natural differences of character will be equally betrayed. Thus the
Romano-Cogitative Michael Angelo exhibited the thoughtful energy of his
mind in a fervid and exaggerated opinion of the fiercest passions, and
delighted in representations—not always the most refined—of scenes from
which most minds revolt, to which he even added a horror all his own.
The exaggerated action and muscular development of Michael Angelo’s
figures, the gigantic scale on which he preferred to draw them, and the
stupendous works which he unhesitatingly undertook, betray an energetic
and coarse mind, quite accordant with his Roman profile. The Greek-Nosed
Raffaelle, on the other hand, paid exclusive attention to beauty of
form, and the pourtraying of the gentler and more amiable sentiments,
especially of the female character. He was never betrayed into any
extravagancies of action or passion; but delighted to dwell on the
peaceful holiness and gentle sentiment of the Virgin Mother and the
Infant Jesus, or the graceful virtues of the female saints.

[Illustration:

  HOBBES.
]

The major part of our illustrations being taken from purely literary
men, present Greco-Cogitative Noses. It is not our intention to descant
at length on persons whose works are well known, by name at least, to
every one, and whose lives were, for the most part, passed in the usual
monotonous tenour of those of literary men; but Bacon may be referred to
as an important corroborative instance of the shrewd, wily measures by
which the astute Greek prefers to further his ambition. Bacon as a man
presents such a lamentable contrast to Bacon as a philosopher, and the
wretched underhand means by which he attained eminence are so well
known, and so painful to dwell upon, that we refrain from doing more
than referring the reader to the facts for comparison with his profile.
Wretchedly inconsistent as his character appears, it is not inconsistent
with his Nose; and, perhaps, what are termed his inconsistencies, are
only a proof that the intellectual and moral powers are distinct, and
that the most profuse development of the former, cannot compensate for a
deficiency of the latter.

It is unnecessary to dissertate upon the names in the present list in
order to demonstrate their right to appear among the Cogitatives. No one
will deny their title to that most enviable epithet, and it would be by
portraits alone that the identity between their minds and noses could be
exhibited to any who are incredulous on that subject. To such we can
only say, examine for yourselves; the portraits are, for the most part,
easily attainable; and an attentive examination of them will well repay
the labour, and, without doubt, satisfy the most sceptical of the truth
of the hypothesis.

The names on that list are, for the most part, names which are a volume
in themselves: they write their own history; certainly no encomiums of
ours can add anything to their glory. It is undeniable that it was by
close cogitation, serious, hard thinking, that each of them obtained a
place in the rolls of Fame; and it is equally certain that almost every
person may, by the same process obtain, if not an equal, yet certainly
no mean place in the same estimable record.


It is a common and veracious observation, that certain faces prevail in
certain ages; but it may be further added, that this epochal character
frequently arises from the formation of the Nose, more especially of the
Cogitative part.

Up to about the close of the reign of James I. the Greco-Cogitative
prevailed; during the time of Charles I. and the Protectorate, the
Romano-Cogitative was almost universal, and the Cogitative part was much
increased in intensity. The Noses of the time are remarkably broad and
thick, a circumstance which can only be attributed to the serious
religious and political questions which then agitated the minds of all
men. With the careless dissipated days of the second Charles came in the
thin, long Greek, or Greco-Roman Nose, with little or none of the
Cogitative element; and this for the most part prevailed up to the
commencement of the present century. What future ages may determine to
be the form of Nose characteristic of our age it is impossible to say.
_We_ can form no accurate judgment, for time alone can separate the
tares from the wheat, and decide who are the great men of our age.

To an observant mind there is something very remarkable in the striking
contrast between the physiognomies of the leaders in our own Rebellion
(as it is historically termed) and of those of the French
revolutionists. Besides a certain serious determination, a stern,
unflinching, dogged consciousness of right, that nothing could turn to
the right hand or to the left, which is visible in the countenances of
the former, and to be contrasted with the flippant, wicked,
blood-thirsty-looking smirk of the latter, there is a remarkable
contrast in their Noses. The thick, broad, Cogitative Nose is visible in
all of the former, from Old Noll himself to honest Andrew Marvel; while
the void of thought, sharp, captious, _vulpine_ Nose is to be seen in
every one of the bloody tyrants of the French _sans-culotterie_.

The latter look like men who

              “Could smile, and murder while they smile.”

The former like men who

          “Put their trust in God, and keep their powder dry.”

Wordsworth has so splendidly and truly contrasted the men of either age
that we cannot resist inserting his lines entire:

          “Great men have been among us; hands that penned
          And tongues that uttered wisdom—better none;
          The later Sydney, Marvel, Harrington,
          Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend.
          These moralists could act and comprehend;
          They knew how genuine glory was put on;
          Taught us how rightfully a nation shone
          In splendour; what strength was, that would not ben
          But in magnanimous meekness. France, ’tis strange,
          Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then.
          Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change!
          No single volume paramount, no code,
          No master-spirit, no determined road;—
          But equally a want of Books and Men!”

In the fifth line, “These moralists could _act_ AND _comprehend_,” we
have a beautiful and exact paraphrase of the Romano-Cogitative, which we
noticed as characteristic of the Cromwellian age—the union of physical
energy with mental power.

It was a remark which we heard made some thirty years ago, by a very
observant man, that there was a wonderful identity of expression in the
countenances of all the men of the French Revolution, and that the same
peculiar expression is to be seen in the faces of the conspirators of
the Gunpowder Plot. Subsequent personal observation has confirmed this
remark, of which it is a curious and recent corroboration, that the same
expression is visible in the countenances of some of the leading
Terrorists of the late French Revolution.[23] The countenance of “bloody
Mary” is an instance of the same peculiar expression.

The old gentleman who made the remark which drew our infantine attention
added, (and it was this perhaps which impressed it upon our memory) that
there was “_blood_” written in all their faces.

We cannot improve upon this definition, though in one word, it might
also be called a _wolfish_ look—lean, cruel, hungry, grinning.

When treating of the Greek Nose, we stated that the Nose of Milton
expanded into the Cogitative form when, in the latter part of his life,
he was compelled to turn his thoughts anxiously and seriously to the
condition of his unhappy country, and when, with a holy and unswerving
determination he devoted his whole soul to the composition of a poem,
whose fame should be co-extensive with the world whose creation it
described. We then claimed this instance of change of form coincident
with change of character, as a proof of the correctness of the
hypothesis. It was however a superfluous precaution, for the coincident
change is equally true in almost every instance of the Cogitative Nose.
No man can alter the profile of his Nose, but he may increase its
latitudinal diameter. As to the former, he must submit to have it what
shape God pleases; as to the latter, he may make it almost any shape he
himself pleases—for the one indicates acquired habits, the other
inherent properties.

The Cogitative Nose expands with expanding thoughts and is therefore
rarely, if ever, much developed in youth; neither, on the other hand, is
the very sharp or Noncogitative Nose frequently visible in early life,
for there are few to whom God has not given the elements of thought. It
is our own faults, therefore, if we throw away the talents bestowed upon
us, and suffer our minds to degenerate into inanity and our Noses into
sharpness.

For this reason, it is a laudable ambition in a young man to cultivate a
Cogitative Nose, for he can only do so by cultivating his mind. And,
forasmuch as it is the only part of the Nose which is under the controul
of the owner, so it is that which can be most distinctly judged of and
its expansion watched; for, though the owner can never see the perfect
profile of his Nose, he may always form a correct estimate of its
_breadth_. We should be quite justified in adding this to the numerous
proofs of design in the adaptation of the human body to the soul, but as
many persons cannot surmount a certain sense of the ridiculous in the
subject before us, we forbear. Those who are impressed with the truth of
our system, will at once admit the inference, and perceive its value in
Natural Theology.[24]

As it has been deemed unnecessary to extend the present chapter with any
biographical or critical sketches of the examples adduced in
corroboration of Class III, we will devote the next to the more useful
task of inquiring how a Cogitative Mind and its certain accompaniment, a
Cogitative Nose, may be acquired.




                               CHAPTER V.
                     HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE.


It is a great and prevalent mistake to imagine that a Cogitative mind
(and Nose) is to be acquired by reading alone. It is almost certain
that, as books multiply, Cogitative Minds decrease, for how is a man to
think, if all his thinking is done for him? The mind, when constantly
supplied with extraneous thoughts must, without great care, lose the
habit of generating internal ones. All the greatest thinkers have been
the first in their department of thought. Homer, Dante, Chaucer,
Shakspere, Bacon, &c. These men, as compared with even mediocre men in
our day, had very little learning,—but they had vast wisdom.

Read Bacon’s Novum Organum and Sylva for instance, and see how few facts
there are in them but such as are either now known to, or laughed at, by
every school-boy; yet direct your attention to the train of thought, to
the generalizations from these simple facts, to the originality of the
deductions, and behold how the dwarf in Knowledge becomes a giant in
Wisdom! It is even true that Bacon was behind his cotemporaries in many
matters of mere knowledge; yet the majesty of his wisdom was so vast
that it still rules, and ever must rule, the world of science.

So, as on the one hand, a man may have wisdom and yet want knowledge; on
the other, he may have all knowledge and be able to discourse of all
things, from the hyssop to the cedar, and yet want wisdom. It is of no
use to read and accumulate facts if we do not also _think_. Better
indeed to think and never read, than read and not think. If a man does
not think for himself, if he does not originate ideas, if books are not
to him _only_ the elements of thought, if he is not fully and immoveably
impressed with the conviction that two and two make five, or any greater
number which the Cogitative Mind can evolve, he has no chance of
becoming a wise man, whatever his learning, and however profound his
acquaintance with the thoughts of other men.

But you reply, two and two do not, and cannot make five, &c. We rejoin,
they as certainly and unquestionably do in metaphysics, as they
certainly and unquestionably do not in physics. True, in physics, two
and two things, two and two facts make four, and only four; but if the
mind, when in possession of those four, can generate nothing more from
them, it is a hopeless case with that mind. If, upon the recipience of
such four facts the mind remains contented with the arithmetical fact
that, from four units it has segregated four, it is, and for ever will,
remain stationary; it has gained nothing, and might as well have left
those four facts in their original units, for their addition has not
added to it one particle of wisdom.

Facts are, or ought to be, only the generators of ideas. Facts in
themselves are utterly worthless; it is in their associations, in their
consequences, their bearings on each other; it is as they support or
refute systems, theories and other mind-born facts, that they are of
value. Now, it is only by the action of mind upon them that they have
associations, consequences, &c. Without mind, facts must for ever remain
units; even though added together, _ad infinitum_, they have no natural
co-unity, no cohesion, no affinity for each other. A thousand facts
added together are still but a thousand units, unless mind has cohered
them into a system. This done, you clearly have the thousand facts
still, but you have _also_ something infinitely more valuable, you have
a mind-born fact, a deduction, a system, hypothesis, theory, axiom, or
whatever you please to call it.

Cordially as we hate coining new words, we still more cordially hate the
German fashion of hooking together two vernacular words and calling the
junction an addition to the language. But we are compelled, in order to
save circumlocution, to coin a word to express those facts which spring
from Mind, whether, as in moral philosophy, purely metaphysical, or as
in natural philosophy, generated by Mind from Matter, by Reason from
Experience. Such facts we would beg to call noögenisms (νοος, _mens_,
_cogitatio_, and γενος, _natus_, _progenies_); therein including all
mental offsprings or deductions, whether called hypotheses, theories,
systems, sciences, axioms, aphorisms, &c.

Noögenisms, therefore, are those facts which mind generates from other
facts without annihilating the latter; hence it is said that,
metaphysically, two and two make five. Thus, mind, contemplating the
physical facts of the super-position of strata, deduces from and adds to
them this metaphysical fact or noögenism;—Strata were deposited
successively.

Herein appears too an essential difference between Mind and Matter. If
diverse substances, having a natural affinity, be amalgamated, a new
substance is obtained, but the elements are lost. Of hydrogen and oxygen
water may be made, but the gases are forthwith lost in the fluid; the
procedure may be reversed and the water be converted into gases, but the
water has disappeared. This is not so with mind and noögenisms; for
however closely, by a mental synthesis, divers facts may be united into
a new fact or noögenism, the latter is obtained without losing the
former or elementary facts, which remain as Knowledge, elements of
Wisdom, to support the noögenism or create others.

We see then, that while Mind is crescive, Matter is not. Matter is
neither crescive nor decrescive. It may be changed into divers forms,
animal, vegetable, or mineral, but it never can be varied in _quantity_.
The six feet of animated clay dies, it rots in the silent tomb; years
pass by. The hand of affection which protected the loathsome, yet—for
the once animating spirit’s sake—beloved, remains is cold and rotted
too. The sepulchre, so long forgotten and deserted, again becomes of
interest to the brother of the hyæna and the resurrectionist—the
antiquarian. He, in his cool, business-like phraseology, opens a barrow
or exhumes a tomb, and finds—what? A pound of dust! The sole visible
remains of a gigantic hero or a stalwart king. Yet is not one particle
of that ancient demigod perished. Every atom is, in some shape or other,
in the universe. Some atoms may “have gone a passage through the guts of
a beggar,” and so have nurtured an other human form; some may have
stopped a beer-barrel and so

               “Imperious Cæsar dead, and turned to clay,
               Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

The theory of the metempsychosis is true of matter; and as the ancient
sages believed the soul to be material, that theory, so far from being
violently absurd (as we in the pride of better knowledge are apt to term
it), was almost the only theory which the thinking and observant mind
could of itself elaborate. Hence the adoption of that system by
far-distant nations is no proof of inter-communication. What the Brahmin
in India found a natural result of the doctrine of the materiality of
the soul and its consequent analogy to everything else material, the
Druid in Britain would arrive at with equal ease.

But Mind is both crescive and decrescive; and it is another peculiar
property of Mind, that it is never stationary,—it is always changing,
increasing or decreasing. This is an important consideration; a fearful
responsibility cast upon it. If the one talent (and God has so benignly
ordered it, that no sane, and therefore responsible, mind is devoid of
at least one talent,) is hid in a napkin, the servant is condemned and
his talent taken from him. But if the talent is put out to use, it will
increase and grow, and make other talents, and the lord of that servant
will receive his own again with usury. For, having endowed man with this
crescive power, He justly demands that power to be exercised and the
mind to be enlarged and expanded “by every one according to his several
ability,” so that He may reap the harvest which his well-rewarded
servants have gathered in, “reaping where He hath not sown, and
gathering where He hath not strewed.”

The very cause of this crescive power of mind is, that the sum of the
units aggregated by mind is greater than the arithmetical sum of the
units; and the cause of this is, that facts, the elements of noögenisms,
are not, like chemical elements, lost in the fact compounded from them,
but retain likewise a separate, independent existence, capable of being
again compounded into other noögenisms, and still ever without losing
their original forms.

It will now be understood what is meant by two and two making five, &c.;
and until a man is incontrovertibly convinced of the possibility of this
he will in vain multiply facts. Facts must be added together, not for
their arithmetical product, which is Knowledge, but for their
metaphysical product, which is Wisdom. You will frequently hear asked by
utilitarians, what is the use (_cui bono?_) of such and such Knowledge?
Remember that the use of all Knowledge is to feed the mind and to
generate Wisdom, and you will always have this ready and sufficient
reply, “It is food for thought.”

And here it may not be out of place to endeavour to point out by an
example the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and at the same
time elucidate more clearly how the former is to be made subservient to
and the genetrix of the latter. We observe that a certain quartz-stone
is round. We have learnt two facts, the nature and form of the stone.
Now what is the value of those facts _per se_? The recipience of them
has increased our _knowledge_, but is the mind strengthened or rendered
one jot _wiser_? We trow not. But as a key or foundation to an aqueous
_theory_ of geology they are almost infinitely important. The Cogitative
Mind perceives that the round stone must have once been an angular
fragment broken off from some rock of quartz, and asks, “How came it
broken off? and how came it round?” The answers are a whole system of
geology; nay, perhaps an entire system of the universe a noögenism of
the sublimest kind.[25] Have not these facts generated? Is it not clear
that, if the physical units had remained metaphysical units they would
have been valueless? but being submitted to the powerful energy of
intense thought they become the parents of a noögenism, into which “the
angels desired to look,” and at the first dawn of which, from the
primæval chaos, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of
God shouted for joy.”

Neither is this instance fanciful; for, while we write, it reminds us
that this identical simple fact,—a round pebble on a common,—appeared to
Paley to be one from which the mind could evolve nothing, and therefore
he contrasted it with a watch, whose mechanism led the mind to theorize
on its causes and origin; whereas, a recent commentator thereon justly
observes, that the stone was as fertile a source of cogitation and as
able a guide “from Nature up to Nature’s God,” as the watch was from
itself to _its_ maker.

From this example let us take warning, that facts be not to us nothing
more than round stones. Let us be careful never to let our minds rest
content with the mere accumulation of facts, but ever strive to build
them up into something more useful and ennobling. Let us use them as
bricks—mere logs of burnt clay in themselves, but fit to build glorious
monuments of the sublime power of human invention. Let us remember that
Ideas are the only things of real permanent value in this world; and
that, though we may store our brain with Facts till our heads burst,
unless those facts are to us only generators of Ideas, we have not, and
cannot acquire a Cogitative mind; we may have Knowledge, but we have not
Wisdom. A wise man hath wisely said, that “the wise man is”—not he who
knoweth _things_, but—“he who knoweth the _interpretation_ of a thing”
[_Eccles._ viii. 21]; and for this purpose only it is that, “Wise men
lay up knowledge” [_Prov._ x. 14], for “Wisdom finds out knowledge of
witty inventions” [_Prov._ viii. 12].

In order to effectually discipline the mind to attentive study, and to
save it from the strong temptation which is offered to desultory
reading, it is advisable for the adult and partially educated student to
form an hypothesis and read up to it. To reverse, in fact, the Baconian
principles of philosophy, and to study from hypothesis to facts, and not
from facts to hypothesis. This is, it is true, opposed to modern
philosophical principles, but properly modified and carefully guarded
against self-conceit and dogmatism, it is almost the only proper and
effective mode of study. It is the ancient or Aristotelian mode; and
though, when refuted by Bacon, as a mode of “discovering the sciences,”
it had become shamefully abused and degenerate, it has produced more
great original thinkers than the modern. Observe, that we recommend it
only as a mode of _study_, _i. e._, of disciplining and exercising the
mind, for beyond the purpose of _training_ it should not be pursued. It
is too dangerous to be prosecuted far, for the mind which has long
formed and nursed up a favourite hypothesis is unwilling to abandon it,
and is too apt to force all facts into accordance with it, instead of
modifying or abandoning it as new facts arise.[26]

But the great advantages of this plan, as a training process, would
appear to be—1st. That the mind being thus occupied with an hypothesis
has always that to direct its researches in a settled, uniform, and
definite course. 2nd. That every new fact accumulated is immediately
compared with the hypothesis, and is incorporated or written off as
_contra_, after this mental exercise, as occasion may require. Thus no
fact ever comes into the mind without being subjected to thought and
giving exercise to the important faculty of comparison. And this process
of comparing, to which every fact must be subjected, will not only
impress the fact and its comparatives on the memory, but will powerfully
tend to exercise and strengthen the Cogitative powers; for there is no
operation of mind which more actively calls into energy all the
faculties at once than comparing, because to compare two things fairly
we must (so to speak) know the length, breadth, depth, density and
powers of each. 3rd. A steady habit of reading is acquired; we read with
a definite aim—the establishment or refutation (we ought not to care
which) of our hypothesis, and, however wide and discursive our reading,
there is little danger of its becoming desultory—that curse and bane of
modern mind. The Baconian process of accumulating facts before
hypothesising, almost demands desultory reading, for the mind sees no
fixed end towards which it shall arrive; it is not permitted to guess
what may be the result of its studies, and hence too often loses all
interest in them, and remains content with the barren accumulation of
things.

What we would suggest may be thus illustrated: Let a man, intending to
study history, first adopt an hypothesis—of course he must have some
pre-knowledge. It matters not what the hypothesis, so that it is likely
to involve a very wide field of inquiry. If he contemplate primæval
history, let him adopt some such proposition as this, “Whether we can
infer from the institutions of mankind that they all spring from one
common ancestor?” Or this, “Whether any nation whose national records
have been preserved were the first owners of the soil?”

Is it not obvious, that with some such proposition before the mind it
will take much more interest in and more steadily direct its studies,
and that facts will be more easily remembered, from their bearing on the
hypothesis, than if merely received as naked, isolated units?

The only precautions to be taken are, not to be too strongly wedded to
either side of our hypothesis, nor to sit down too soon satisfied that
it is proved or disproved, nor to set up for teachers and discoverers,
while we are only learners and making discoveries.

It will be seen hereafter that, notwithstanding what has been said, we
differ not at all from Bacon himself; we differ only from his
pseudo-disciples, who have no more in common with his enlarged views of
the uses of science than the schools had with Aristotle, or the New
Academy with Plato. Nevertheless, we well know that we shall be well
abused by these disciples as an impugner of Bacon, and as a heretic to
his philosophy, just as your pious people condemn as an infidel or
atheist every one who denies any dogma which their wild enthusiasm has
grafted on the Bible. It is not in religion alone that bigotry is to be
found.

Bacon himself pursued the mode of study which we suggest. At fifteen he
formed an hypothesis, and devoted his whole life to its elucidation. The
hypothesis round which, as a centre, he gathered every fact within his
reach was this: Whether or not the Aristotelian was the best mode of
cultivating the mind, and of discovering the sciences?

He seems at first to have been disposed to think that it was neither;
but the conclusion to which he finally came, after many years of close
thought and arduous study, was, that it was the best mode of cultivating
the mind, but the worst mode of discovering the sciences. He did not
soon sit down satisfied that he was right, and set up for a dogmatic
teacher of his new philosophy. He waited patiently for any new light
which years and experience might throw upon it, either bringing out more
brightly its beauties or disclosing more satisfactorily its errors. Once
in each year he reviewed it and tested it by the new facts which he had
gleaned during the year’s studies. Once in each year, for twelve long
years, he wrote out with his own hand, altering, condensing and
verifying his _Novum Organum_ before he published it.

So much stress has, notwithstanding this illustrious example of the
master, been laid, ever since the publication of the Baconian or
inductive philosophy, upon the bare accumulation of facts, and so much
has been written against generalizing and hypothesizing, that it may be
as well, before quitting the subject, to point out wherein the disciples
of Bacon have neglected the precepts of their master; and to inquire
whether this neglect, and the only _partial_ adoption of his teachings,
have not contributed greatly to the advancement of mere Knowledge at the
expense of true Wisdom, and thus been very important causes of the
degeneracy of modern mind.

Bacon seems to have foreseen this effect of the exclusive adoption of
the experimental part of his philosophy—the only part which men have yet
had the courage to adopt—when he said, “Our way of _discovering the
sciences_ almost _levels the capacities_ of men, and leaves little room
for excellence, as it performs all things by sure rules and
demonstrations, and therefore these discoveries of ours are, as we have
often said, rather owing to felicity than to any great talent, and are
rather the production of time than of genius.”[27] It was for this
reason that he so earnestly, as we shall see hereafter, insisted against
its use by young and common minds, or as a means of mental cultivation.
And too truly has the prophetic caution been fulfilled! Nevertheless, as
it will be loudly denied that modern mind is degenerate, it may be as
well to ask how much we are in anything, except physical science (facts,
or what Bacon calls “Experience”), in advance of our two hundred years’
dead ancestors. Array the names in our list of Cogitatives,
chronologically and analytically, or do so by any list of great
thinkers, and you will scarcely find a proportion of one since 1700, to
three who lived between 1550 and that date.

Nevertheless, though there is this falling off in Wisdom, how vast has
been the accession of Knowledge. Bacon, in his day, complained that the
former, (Reason) had gone on without the latter (Experience); so that,
while mind had attained the highest flights of which it seemed capable,
the arcana of nature were yet unexplored, and little or nothing had been
done to advance man’s physical welfare. He said that, hitherto, reason
and experience were as new gifts of the gods:—the one laid on the back
of a light bird, the other on a dull ass, and that as yet they had not
been united. His object was to unite them; to this purpose he devoted
his gifted mind and strained his utmost energies. Yet if he were living
now he would be compelled to make the same complaint, with this
variation however, that men have abandoned the burden of the bird, and
have loaded themselves with that of the ass.

While then we admit the rapid advancement of Knowledge, let us pause a
moment and inquire if it is not a proof of the degeneracy of mind and
the decay of Wisdom, that, in that which is purely mental or dependent
on mind, we have no names of equal note with the names of those who
lived before the exclusive adoption of the experimental part of the
Baconian philosophy. Where is the name in poetry to set against
Shakspere and Milton; in metaphysics to match with Locke, Hobbes, &c.;
in deduction from facts and generalization with Bacon, Newton, Halley,
&c.; in theology, with the hundreds of names which yet eclipse all
modern commentators? It may perhaps be said in reply, if we have not
such great minds, we have a larger number of thinkers of lesser
magnitude. This is doubtful. Time has obliterated the swarms of lesser
fry who, like their congeners of the nineteenth century, lived their day
and gained a temporary fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But further, it is easy to be a triton among minnows. It is as easy
now-a-days to set up for a literary character and “write a book” without
an idea, as it is for an insolvent man to pass for a rich one and live
sumptuously on borrowed capital and paper money. Our thousands of
authors are but the minnows which sport in the shallow brooks and live
their little day in glorious self-gratulation on the laudations of their
brother minnows; but if they happen to get out into the deep strong
waters, and a triton turns his stern eye upon them—pop—they turn their
tails round, dive to the bottom and are seen no more. Thus it was with
our novelists; they shone and blazed away—happy, glorious
book-wrights—till the triton Scott came athwart their path, and
straightway they were gone. And surely, surely, we now again want
another Scott to demolish the rapidly increasing tribe of cachinnators,
who appear to deem that the proper end of light literature is just to
raise a temporary laugh and be forgotten. Heaven send us salvation from
more Jerrolds, à Beckets and the whole tribe of ephemeral
laughing-stocks! It is the same in other and more important departments
of literature. Our historians are mere compilers of old letters; we fly
to Germany for historical criticism and acute generalizations from
facts, contenting ourselves with laboriously picking up a few obscure
facts for the use of our more deeply-thinking neighbours; who are
treading in the paths which our own sages trod two hundred and fifty
years ago, because they have not yet placed the exact sciences at the
head of intellectual pursuits, and abandoned thought for mechanisms,
generalizations from facts for the barren accumulation of facts.

The complaint of Lord Bacon is truer now than it was in his time: “If a
man turn his eyes to libraries, he may perhaps be surprised at the
immense variety of books he finds; but upon examining and diligently
weighing their matters and contents, he will be struck with amazement on
the other side; and after finding no end of repetitions, but that men
continually treat and speak the same things over and over again, fall
from admiration of the variety into a wonder at the want and scantiness
of those things which have hitherto detained and possessed the minds of
men.” Unhappily his system, by the universal and indiscriminate adoption
of only its lower and material offices to the exclusion of those higher
ends which he contemplated from it, and by its being used as a mode of
cultivating the mind, as well as a means of discovering the sciences,
has rather strengthened than weakened the justice of these censures. Our
Augustan age of thought is still that of Elizabeth and James I.; the
latter part of the sixteenth, and the early part of the seventeenth
centuries still outshine the nineteenth in loftiness of thought and
solidity of learning; yet we complacently boast of our progress, because
we rattle through the fields of learning at ten times the speed of our
ancestors, as we do over our railway-sected country, gleaning about as
little information of the one as of the other. We dash through the deep
cuttings and dark tunnels of literature at railway speed, taking
assertions for facts, and empty declamation and tawdry immorality for
sense and religion; and then, like the nervous lady who rides through a
railway tunnel without fainting, congratulate ourselves on having
accomplished some gigantic feat; though we have learnt just as much
about the subject of our studies as she has of the construction of the
tunnel; but having, like her, fretted and fumed for a few minutes at
some dark difficulty, we unite with her in thinking ourselves very
valiant and clever people.

We avail ourselves of the roads and paths which others have made, and
never stop to examine their solidity or foundations, or the principles
on which they are constructed. We lose the habits of deep investigation
and close thinking by a long and entire reliance on others, and our
minds become dissipated, and a prey to all the silly novelties which
spring like ephemera from the almost stagnant pools of modern brains.

This mental dissipation and its concomitant evil, reading for the
purpose of killing time,—with far more baneful effects than never
reading at all, but relying merely on our own serious excogitations,—are
curses from which we ought earnestly to endeavour to save ourselves.
This we can only do by sternly exercising the mind in settled definite
habits of thought, by placing before it a determinate aim and end to its
cogitations. It must know beforehand whither it is tending, so that, as
it proceeds, it may note its progress, and be able to judge whether it
is advancing or receding. It would be as absurd for a man to start on a
journey without knowing whither he was going, but to be continually
trying first one road and then another, in hopes it would bring him
somewhere, as it is for a student to sit down to study without any
definite purpose or view before him. True, the traveller might pick up
many facts and get some knowledge in his desultory course, and so might
the student; but neither would be advanced on his journey or have gained
any true wisdom. Yet this is the course of modern study. Loose,
desultory reading: a vague acquisition of unconnected facts is alone
aimed at. “Witness the transactions of our scientific bodies—a huge
undigestive mass of valuable facts; mere raw materials,
knowledge-bricks, which no one has dared yet to generalize or build up
into a harmonious and well-proportioned temple of wisdom.”

Run your memory over the records of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, and what do you find? Is it not exactly the same
as that which the witty author of “Hudibras” castigated two hundred
years ago, in his satire on the Royal Society,—a mere chronicle of the
feats of butterfly-hunters and fly-catchers? Is there to be found in the
eighteen years’ “Transactions” of the hundreds of scientific men, whose
combined knowledge is many hundred times more extensive than that of the
_savans_ of any past age, a single attempt at a generalization of their
immense field of facts? Is there any effort at what Solomon calls the
“interpretation of things?”—at gathering the “fruits” of the Baconian
system? Are they not only a barren addition to the mountain of facts
already accumulated? Alas! it is too true.

Modern _savans_ shrink from using the materials which, for several
centuries, thousands of laborious literary ants have been collecting.
Like the unhappy Psyche, doomed by the inexorable Venus to arrange and
sort into respective heaps a confused mass of wheat, barley, rye, millet
and other kinds of grain, they sit down in despair of accomplishing the
apparently hopeless task. Frightened at the gigantic labour, they not
only fly from it themselves but condemn every one who attempts to
arrange systematically the grains which, assorted, would afford valuable
seed for fresh crops of food, but which, while thus intermingled, are
utterly useless and unproductive. With an insane determination _not_ to
see the work which it is the duty imposed on the soul (Psyche) by the
prolific powers of nature (Venus) to accomplish, they go on adding to
the heterogeneous heap, and endeavour, by loud and clamorous applauses
of those who are mere collectors like themselves, to drown the voice of
those who would incite them to the enjoined and higher duty of assorting
and arranging.

Should any one, like the able but mistaken author of the “Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation,” endeavour to bring Thought to bear
upon these dry bones and make them live, to generalize and build up a
system from them, great is the outcry and terrible are the
denunciations. The modern Prometheus who would animate with the
celestial fire of forethought the clay which lies a dead and useless
mass at his feet, is clamourously damned by his timid brethren the
Epimethei, the after or past-thinkers; and, unless he is endowed with
more than mortal power, he must submit to have his heart daily devoured
by the racking fiends—envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.

One of the laborious ants of whom we have been speaking asks, “For what
do we read?” and complacently answers, “To know _facts_.”[28] Indeed!
The highest office of mind is to make itself a barren storehouse! To us
it appears, on the contrary, that we should read and study generally,
not to _know_ facts, but to _be wise_ from facts, to make the head wiser
and the heart better. The mind is not to be considered as a mere granary
and barren receptacle of literary food, but rather as the stomach which
converts into a new substance—assimilating good healthy flesh and
blood—the heterogeneous materials which are put into it. Another ant, of
no mean pretensions among his brethren, enthusiastically endeavours, by
promises of “literary glory,” to incite some of them to pile up into one
heap the confused materials they have collected. “Let us see,” he says
with childish glee, “how much we’ve got! You John, and you Willy, and
you Bobby bring what you’ve collected! There pile it up! Make a snow
man; cut him eyes, and nose, and mouth.” There he is with a pipe in his
white lips. Doesn’t he look sage, and grave, and solemn? Dance round
him, ye children; clap your hands and be merry. Rejoice over your work
while it lasts. The first warm breath of spring will melt it away. It is
no man, it has no life, it is cold and dead. The snow, give it what
shape you will, is snow still. You have collected much, but you have got
nothing new out of your collection. But lest it should be supposed that
we belie this celebrated ant—this collector of grain—we will quote his
own words: “Within the last two hundred years (says Professor Playfair),
or since Galileo and Bacon taught us this great lesson, _we have been
employed in recording facts_ in ten thousand several volumes. But thus
scattered, they lose so much of their value and importance, that, in
another age, we may hope some aspirant after literary glory will perform
the Herculean labour of condensing the whole into (What?—a system of the
universe? a better knowledge of nature? No!) _a volume!_” A _volume!_
that is to say, gather the scattered masses into one heap as
heterogeneous as the scattered masses; pile up the snow, strewed over
pathway and field, hedge and ditch, into a snow man. That is the highest
aspiration of this Professor of divers learned societies. His grovelling
soul soars not to the hope that any new fact may be extracted by mind
from this vast heap of raw materials. He knows not that, metaphysically,
two and two make five, and that without any other material additions,
without any more ant-collections, the heap may be made to grow and
swell, that the spirit of life may be breathed into it, and that, wedded
to mind, it may even become the prolific parent of new facts of a far
higher and more enduring nature than any in his boasted volume. Facts,
which, having mind for one of their parents, will with filial love pay
back in tenfold blessings the life given them; facts which will lead
that parent to unravel the mysterious secrets of nature, and enable her
to behold the wonderful arcana of its Holy of Holies.

This is the purpose for which we should read, and this the glorious end
for which we should collect facts; instead of merely contenting
ourselves with being employed, as Playfair too truly says we have been
since the time of Bacon, “in recording facts in ten thousand several
volumes,” with no higher aspiration than that some laborious
stable-cleaner may sweep them up, hay and straw, corn and rubbish, into
one vast heap.

Since this was written, it pleases us to see that the able author of
“Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” has in his “Explanations”
spoken to the same effect and added another instance of the low estimate
formed by modern scientific minds of the uses of facts. “From year to
year and from age to age we see scientific men at work, adding, no
doubt, much to the known, and advancing many important interests, but at
the same time doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views
of nature. Experiments, in however narrow a walk, facts, of whatever
minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies. All beyond is
regarded with suspicion find distrust. The consequence is, that
_philosophy_, as it exists among us, _does nothing to raise its votaries
above the common ideas of their time_. Let me call upon the reader to
bring to his remembrance the impressions which have been usually made
upon him by the transactions of learned societies, and the pursuits of
individual men of science. Did he not always feel that while there was
laudable industry and zeal there was also an intellectual timidity,
rendering all the results philosophically barren?

“Perhaps a more lively illustration of their deficiency in the _life and
soul of nature-seeking_ could not be presented than in the view which
Sir John Herschel gives of the uses of science, in a Treatise reputed as
one of the most philosophical ever produced in our country. These uses,
according to the learned knight, are strictly material—it might be said
sordid—namely, ‘to show us how to avoid attempting impossibilities, to
secure us from important mistakes, in attempting what is in itself
possible by means either inadequate or actually opposed to the end in
view; to enable us to accomplish our ends in the easiest, shortest and
most economical and most effectual manner; to induce us to attempt and
enable us to accomplish, objects which, but for such knowledge, we
should never have thought of undertaking.’

“Such results, it will be felt, may occasionally be of importance in
saving a country gentleman from a hopeless mining speculation, or in
adding to the powers and profits of an iron-foundry or a cotton-mill,
but nothing more. When the awakened and craving mind asks what science
can do for us in explaining the great ends of the author of nature, and
our relations to Him, to good and evil, to life and to eternity, the man
of science turns to his collection of shells or butterflies, to his
electric machine or his retort, and is mute as a child who, sporting on
the beach, is asked what lands lie beyond the great ocean which
stretches before him.”[29]

This is unhappily too true a picture of modern science. Every effort is
made in scientific works to impress the material and sordid
money-getting uses of science as its only true end, and the highest
relation which it bears to humanity. Read any tract on the uses of
geology, and is there a word of high hope that the addition which recent
discoveries in this department have made to knowledge will assist in
raising and elevating the mind, or throw any new light upon the
mysteries of nature?

Not a word: but it is carefully detailed how an acquaintance with the
order of stratified rocks will facilitate the discovery of minerals, or
the boring of Artesian wells.

Are the uses of astronomy dwelt upon, we are taught that it enables the
seaman to navigate trackless seas for commerce or for war. Are the
purposes of chemistry detailed, we learn that it is fertile in assisting
the manufacturer to cheapen his goods, and undersell his less
experienced neighbour.

And are we to believe that for these base uses it will be given to man
to penetrate the wonders of the universe, and read the unexplained
mystery of its creation? Surely not. No, verily, we must raise our souls
far above these debasing cares, before the great and beneficent GOD will
permit us to understand His sublime works. We must come to the task with
clean hands, with pure, holy, unsullied minds, with humble, but high
aspirations, with the submission of little children, but with the
elevation of pure wisdom.

Is it possible that mind can progress at all, if it is for ever fixed on
the earth, grovelling after barren facts and never lifted up to heaven,
nor exercised in contemplation of the discoveries it has accumulated? Is
it possible that the mind can ever be wise which believes that it must
study for facts, and not to ‘weigh and consider?’ Must not the former
for ever remain the mere basket of the rag-and-bone collector? the
receptacle and dead vehicle of material things? Is it not better that
the mind should be exercised, like ‘a light bird,’ in the wildest and
most visionary dreams, than be reduced to such a ‘dull ass,’ or dead
entity? If the student would avoid the latter, he must abandon the mere
accumulation of facts for the comparing and weighing of evidence, the
calm looking for results, and the deliberate generalization from the
facts collected by the fact-collectors; the rag-and-bone-pickers, the
hewers of wood and drawers of water of the human race. Nevertheless
despise them not; they fill their allotted station in the world; they
are as necessary to the thinkers as the different ranks in society are
to each other. Bear in mind that Bacon never intended his system for
_students_, or to be used as a mental exercise. He only proposed it as a
means, (and confessedly the only true means) of ‘discovering the
sciences,’ and not as a mode of ‘cultivating’ the mind. It was to be the
exercise of the experienced and completely cultivated mind only, ‘of the
man of riper years, sound in his senses, and of a clear, unbiassed
mind.’[30] He foresaw and cautioned against its abuse by ‘vulgar minds.’
And in the sense used by him all young and learning minds are vulgar
(common) minds. The specialities which must distinguish them from the
common herd, are as yet unknown and hidden beneath the crust of
inexperienced ignorance.

He himself earnestly prays that his own and the Aristotelian system may
live together, and go hand in hand, the latter to cultivate the mind,
the former to discover facts. His words so long forgotten and unheeded
by his disciples are: “Let there be therefore, by joint consent, two
fountains, or dispensations of doctrine, and two tribes of Philosophers,
by no means enemies or strangers, but confederates and mutual
auxiliaries to each other; and let there _be one method of_ CULTIVATING,
and _another of_ DISCOVERING the sciences. Nor is ours very obvious,
_and to be taken at once_, nor tempting to the understanding, nor
_suited to vulgar capacities_, but solely rests upon its utility and
effects” (_i. e._ upon the way in which it is used and the results which
proceed from it). “But no one, sure, can suspect, that we desire to
destroy and demolish the philosophy, the arts, and the sciences at
present in use; for, _on the contrary, we embrace their use_, and
willingly pay them all due honour and observance. For we openly declare
that the things we offer, are not very conducive to these purposes
(mental exercises), as they cannot be brought down to vulgar capacities,
otherwise than by effects and works.”[31] Therefore in advocating the
retention of the Aristotelian mode of thinking for students, we do but
follow in the footsteps of his great opponent; who yet opposed only when
that ancient philosophy was carried beyond, and out of its proper
department—the cultivation of the powers of thought, into the discovery
of the sciences.

“The two faculties of reason and experience,” says Bacon, “should be
properly joined and coupled together.” Reason without experience (facts)
he compares to a light bird; Experience, without reason to a dull ass.
It is better to be the bird than the ass; it is best to be neither, and
yet both. It is only by joining experience with reason that the “sober
certainty” of the quadruped can be coupled with the “waking bliss,” the
ecstatic heavenward flight, of the light and joyous bird. If, like
Bacon, we were to endeavour to read the fable of the Sphinx, we would
say that it represents the wise mind, which has united reason and
experience into a beautiful form; comprehendible by man, but most hard
to be comprehended. Its human head portrays that to intellectual man
alone it is given to join together its other forms, the wings of a bird,
reason; and the body of a quadruped, experience. It is beautiful, for
such union is the perfection of wisdom, and ‘O how comely is wisdom!’ It
is cruel, for many lives must be sacrificed ’ere it can be discovered,
or the problem of its nature be solved.

Far different from the master himself, who saw in his philosophy the
attainment of high and holy purposes, his pseudo-disciples shrink not
from avowing that the material uses of philosophy are of higher import
than the metaphysical. And it is because writers of no mean powers have,
while setting themselves up as encomiasts and expounders of Baconism,
utterly lost sight of the higher and godlike purposes which Bacon hoped
to see his system promote, and have exalted only the simply mean and
sordid uses, which, as tending to man’s temporal comforts, Bacon’s large
heart also desired to increase, that we have so far enlarged our
observations hereon; and shall, ere we conclude, set a few extracts from
these modern views of Baconism in opposition to those of Bacon himself.
From these we shall see that, with regard to their views of the objects
of philosophy, no two systems can be more opposed than that of Bacon
himself, and that of the modern utilitarians, who dare to dub themselves
his disciples. The latter seek in science nothing higher than base
utilitarianism, thus elevating the body at the expense of the soul; the
former sought utilitarianism in company with the attainment of pure
truth and the investigation of the hidden secrets of nature, thus
elevating both soul and body.

It was the fault of the ancient philosophy that it endeavoured to
elevate the soul at the expense of the body, and to separate that which
God has joined together; it is equally the fault—but a far more baneful
one—of modern utilitarianism that it endeavours to elevate the body
above the soul, and treats the comfort of the former as of far higher
importance than the exaltation of the latter.

Bacon alone, truly wise, sought the well-being of both; and he alone
pointed out that the well-being of both lay in the same path, and might
be prosecuted simultaneously. While the ancient philosophy feared to
defile the soul by contact with what was falsely called the base in
nature, and the utilitarian dreads to have his sordid soul elevated
above the same operations,—which he equally terms base, yet loves to
degrade himself to—Bacon acknowledged nothing base in nature, and feared
not to study her simplest and meanest operations in the pursuit of
truth. He knew that whatever advances the soul makes in knowledge and
wisdom, must be made through and by means of the body; therefore, the
latter was not to be despised, but by all possible ways and means to be
made the efficient handmaid of the former. He knew that though the eye
sees not, and the ear hears not, yet that the soul, in this mortal
state, could neither see nor hear without them, and that by increasing
their fact-transmitting powers, he was developing the fact-generating
powers of the mind.

It was for this reason that he contemned not to give his mind to
experience, to making telescopes and ear-trumpets; but nevertheless he
did not regard them as the ultimate and sole end and aim of his
philosophy. His views of the ends of philosophy were, as we shall
presently see, to the full as high and lofty as those of Plato and the
Grecian philosophers; he only sought to arrive at those ends by means
different from those which they pursued. They both sought the same
objects—Truth, and the discovery of the secrets of nature; but while the
one foolishly did this by opposing nature, and acting in contradiction
to her mandates, the other did it by following her patiently through all
her devious windings.

The modern Baconian school of utilitarians errs in stopping half-way,
and in mistaking what Bacon merely deemed media, for the ultimate ends
of his philosophy. Whirled along by a steam-engine, informed by a
telegraph, freed from pain by chloroform, the utilitarian deems suchlike
products of the inductive philosophy, to be the _summum bonum_ of its
founder; forgetful that he considered such to be but the means to a
higher end, and has said that “the _summum bonum_ of human nature is the
possession of Truth, for this is a heaven upon earth.”

But the better to understand this, let us contrast modern Baconism with
Bacon,—“ab uno disce omnes.”

Mr. T. B. Macaulay, a masterly and deservedly popular writer, has
undertaken to give a more correct analysis of the objects of Baconism
than is usually entertained; but as it happens to be only an analysis of
modern utilitarianism, we will avail ourselves of it as a contrast with
Bacon’s own aspirations of the benefits to be derived from his
system.[32]

Hear the utilitarian’s version of Baconism in contrast with the ancient
philosophy.

“Plato, after speaking slightly of the convenience of arithmetic in the
ordinary transactions of life, as to make men shop-keepers or pedlars,
passes to what he considers as a far more important advantage. It
habituates the mind, he tells us, to the contemplation of _pure truth_,
and raises us above the material universe; and he advises his disciples
to this study, in order that they may learn to fix their minds on the
_immutable essences of things_. Bacon on the other hand, valued this
branch of knowledge _only_ on account of its uses with reference to the
visible and tangible world.

“Of mathematics, Plato says the real use is to lead men to the knowledge
of abstract _essential, eternal truth_. Bacon valued mathematics
chiefly, if not solely, on account of those uses which Plato deemed so
base—its application to mechanics, &c. If Bacon erred here, we must
acknowledge that we greatly prefer his error to the opposite error of
Plato.

“To sum up the whole,” says this eulogist of what he deems Baconism
against the ancient philosophy as explained by Plato, “we should say
that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The
aim of the Baconian philosophy, was to provide man with what he
requires, while he continues to be man, and to supply his vulgar wants.
The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. Plato drew a
good bow, but he aimed at the stars; therefore the shot was thrown away.
Bacon fixed his eye on a mark, which was placed on _the earth_, and
within bow-shot, and hit it in the white.”[33]

If this were a true picture of Bacon’s mind, how sad, and low, and
grovelling, must it have been. Accustomed to grieve that he suffered his
soul to be polluted by contact with the world, and bowed his heart
beneath the love of ill-gotten gold, we have yet found consolation in
the thought that the man and the philosopher were two; and that we might
dwell with rapture on the latter, take him to our heart, and make him
our mind’s companion without defiling ourselves with the former. But if
this were a true picture of the philosopher, we must turn from him with
disgust, as one whose soul was so imbued with the low and sordid, that
no intellectual powers, how sublime soever, could elevate it above what
was low and sordid, mean and base.

Sick at heart and disgusted with humanity, we must turn with joy to him
who sought “to exalt man into a god,” who urged us “to the contemplation
of pure truth,” “to fix our minds on the immutable essences of things,”
and “the knowledge of the abstract, essential, eternal truth.”

But thank God, it is not a true picture of Bacon’s mind and purpose in
revealing to the world a new philosophy.

At most it is but one half the picture, and that the lower half. It
exhibits the mouth only, the vehicle of the material things which
sustain the body. Yet nevertheless not to be despised; for without it
the body could not live, and without the body the mind could have no
communion with mortal minds, and as to them must be dead also. But it
entirely cuts off and conceals the upper half of the man; the skull, the
seat of mind, the residence of that God-inspired particle, which alone
ennobles and makes valuable the whole body.

It is true that Bacon hoped by his philosophy to supply man’s vulgar
wants, and to make his sojourn here as easy and comfortable as was
possible; but he sought this only as a necessary and blessed accident by
the way, and not as the end of his new learning.

While he laboured to benefit mankind as mortal man, he also strove to
elevate him as an immortal soul; mindful of the origin which, he dared,
like Plato, to hope to exalt man into a god, by leading the divine
spirit, breathed into him when he was made in the image of God, to a
contemplation and discovery of the secrets of the Great Artificer.

It was a favourite text of Bacon’s, “It is the glory of God to conceal a
matter; it is the glory of the King (a man) to find it out.” [_Prov._
xxv. 2.]

Was not this very much like placing man almost on a parity with God, and
exalting him into a god? And again, even misquoting to suit his lofty
notions of man’s capabilities: “The spirit of man is as the lamp of God,
wherewith He searches every secret.”[34] [_Prov._ xx. 27.] Surely, too,
the aim of him who describes the sole end of his philosophy in the
following words, is not different from that of him who urges his
disciples “to fix their minds on the contemplation of the immutable
essences of things.” “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of
causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging the bounds of
human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”[35]

Neither does he differ at all from the philosophy of the Academy in his
appreciation of pure truth. “Truth, which only doth judge itself,
teacheth that the inquiry of Truth, which is the love-making or wooing
of it; the knowledge of Truth, which is the presence of it; and the
belief of Truth, which is the enjoying of it—_is the sovereign good of
human nature_. The poet saith excellently well: ‘It is a pleasure to
stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure
to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the
adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing
upon the vantage-ground of Truth, and to see the errors and wanderings,
and mist and tempests in the sea below;’[36] so always that this
prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is
heaven upon earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in
providence, and turn upon the poles of Truth.”[37] Is this the language
of one who had no higher aim than “to supply man’s vulgar wants, and
whose eye was ever on a mark which was placed on earth and within
bow-shot?” No! long since must Bacon have been forgotten, if his
philosophy had had no higher end than that which modern utilitarianism
deems its proudest boast.

One more extract will suffice to evince, that in promoting the proper
study of his favourite science, Natural Philosophy, he had far higher
views than mere utilitarianism; though this was to be regarded by the
way and as an accident of no mean importance. “All knowledge, and
especially that of natural philosophy, tendeth highly to the glory of
God in His power, providence and benefits appearing and engraven in His
works, which without this knowledge are beheld but as through a veil,
for if the heavens in the body of them do declare the glory of God to
the eye, much more do they in the rule and decrees of them declare it to
the understanding.”[38]

An apology is needed for this long episode on Bacon, and our apology
must be an anxious desire to direct the student back from the false
school of Baconism to the master himself. Leave the Macaulays, the
Herschels and the Playfairs to the work—and an important and useful work
it is—for which they are fitted; but do you endeavour so to mind earthly
things that you forget not heavenly things.[39] We say not, as did the
ancient philosophers, disregard earthly things; but, while attending to
them, forget not the heavenly, as the utilitarians do. Neither would it
have been necessary to have entered so fully into the matter had we not
been aware that of the thousands who pretend to tread in the steps of
Bacon, not above one or two have ever read his more important works, but
take their notions of his philosophy from such crude and partial views
as the merest utilitarians choose to enunciate as Baconian.

We require no other proof of the degeneracy of modern mind from the
close habits of intense thought which distinguished the predecessors and
cotemporaries of Bacon, than the melancholy fact, that while the _Novum
Organum_ and _De Augmentis_ were, in the author’s time, eagerly read by
every one pretending to a liberal education, and at once elevated him to
a high rank among literary men, they are scarcely ever opened in the
present day, “and though much talked of are but little read. They have
produced, indeed, a vast effect on the opinions of mankind, but they
have produced it through the operation of intermediate agents.”[40] Of
these intermediate agents we have given a few specimens; and as long as
the world submits to receive their version of Baconism, so long will
Baconism elevate Knowledge at the expense of True Wisdom. Let men return
to Bacon, and take _all_ that he teaches instead of part—the inferior
part—and there will be nothing for Wisdom or Knowledge to fear.




                              CHAPTER VI.
                          OF THE JEWISH NOSE.

  CLASS IV.—THE JEWISH, or Hawk Nose, is very convex, and preserves its
    convexity like a bow, throughout the whole length from the eyes to
    the tip. It is thin and sharp.

  It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly matters; and deep
    insight into character, and facility of turning that insight to
    profitable account.


This is a good, useful, practical Nose, very able to carry its owner
successfully through the world, that is as success is now-a-days
measured, by weight of purse; nevertheless it will not elevate him to
any very exalted pitch of intellectuality.

It is called the Jewish Nose in conformity with long-established
nomenclature, and is, perhaps more frequent among the Jews than among
most other nations resident in Europe. It is, however a fallacy to
suppose that the peculiar physiognomy called Jewish is confined to the
Jews, or even exclusively characteristic of them. It is in fact a form
of profile common to all the inhabitants of Syria; and Sir G. Wilkinson
has proved in his erudite work on Ancient Egypt, that the nations
represented in the Egyptian sculptures with this cast of countenance are
not always intended for Jews, as was at one time supposed, but for
Syrians. Moreover, this form of countenance is to this day, the usual
one among the Arabs of that part of the world. This Nose should
therefore more properly be called the Syrian Nose.

This fact enables us to extend our illustrations, by adducing divers
national proofs of the correctness of the indications ascribed to this
Nose.

We have said that it is a good, useful, practical Nose, _i. e._ a good
money-getting Nose, a good commercial Nose, and perhaps the latter term
would be an apt secondary designation for it. Hence, those nations which
have been most largely gifted with it, have been always celebrated for
their commercial success.

The Phœnicians were Syrians, and the portraits which we have of these
people on the Egyptian sculptures, as read by Sir G. Wilkinson, all
exhibit this form of Nose. It is unnecessary to enlarge on the very
early commercial activity of this nation, on its extensive traffic, its
flourishing colonies, and its mighty fleets. While the rest of the world
was in barbarism, or kept their low civilization carefully locked up
within their own dominions, the Phœnicians were spreading arts and
letters among the barbarous nations of Europe, and carrying civilization
forward on its destined course towards the West. And the incentive to
this and the means whereby it was effected were the same as those which
now animate modern Tyre to promote the same Westward tendency of
civilization. What Phœnicia, a little western corner of Asia, did for
Europe, England, a little western corner of Europe, has done and is
doing for lands still further West—America and Austral-Asia; destined to
be in their turns the seats of a still progressive civilization, until
every part of the earth shall have been in succession blessed with a
civilization, if not always equal in degree, always adequate to its age,
requirements, and capacity.

Then when the whole circle shall have been accomplished—and of which
more than two-thirds have been already passed over—when civilization in
Austral-Asia shall touch the confines of its original starting point,
the Eastern shores of India, the consummation of all things shall be at
hand; the purpose for which the earth was created, and for which
millions of years have been slowly, surely, and silently beautifying,
storing, and adapting it, until it is like “the Garden of the Lord,”
shall have been fulfilled; and the whole of this beautiful system shall
vanish away like a breath, yet leave no vacuity, no defect, in the vast
and mighty universe, whose limits utterly transcend our notions of time
and space.

Two-thirds of this circle have been already passed over; the remaining
third is rapidly running out: we already stand half-way between the
beginning and the end of this third part; nay, we are nearer the end
than the beginning, we see more clearly and apprehend more closely the
day when Austral-Asia shall be the seat of civilization and
Christianity, than we do the day when those blessings seventeen hundred
years ago, first landed on our shores; we feel more affinity for, and
more sympathy with, the latter age than with the former, and we may be
assured that we do this because we are much nearer in Time to the one
than to the other.

This is an awful contemplation; we cannot but feel that there is an
extra responsibility cast upon us upon whom literally “the ends of the
world are come,” and that it concerns us more than all who have gone
before to be up and be doing; to take heed that while civilization is
progressing geographically, it is also progressing in power and
character; for upon the extent and nature of the Knowledge which we
transmit, depend in a great degree the extent and nature of the
Knowledge which shall ever reign on the earth.

Theologically considered, the subject is infinitely more awful and
important; and the mind cannot contemplate without fear and trembling,
what may be the consequences if we, instead of a pure and perfect,
transmit to the few generations yet to subsist on the earth, an impure
and imperfect, Christianity.

But to return to our more immediate subject. The Jews have always been
celebrated for shrewdness in commercial affairs. Though the
peculiarities of their religion prevented them from taking a leading
part in the general commercial business of the ancient world, yet among
themselves trade always flourished; and in the present age of the world,
the Jews were in all countries the first revivers of commerce after the
stagnation occasioned by the irruptions of the northern hordes, and in
many nations are still almost the only traders.

It does not always follow, however, that the love and capacity for
getting money is accompanied by a sordid disinclination to part with it.
Numerous instances occur of persons who shrewdly bargain for pence, but
liberally give away pounds. As we may seem to have inferred that the
former is a Jewish habit, it is right, and we are happy to be able to
say, that some instances of princely liberality among modern Jews,
afford lessons which Christians would do well to take.

No very exalted intellectuality is to be looked for from the Syrian
Nose. Its sphere of action is widely different from that of mental
exertion for the mere pleasure thence derivable. Hence, we find, that
notwithstanding the free intercourse which the Phœnicians permitted with
all nations, the ancient sages rarely travelled to Phœnicia for
learning. If they went there, they went like Solomon, to traffic. They
sought learning among the Chaldeans, the Indians, and the Egyptians, but
seldom touched in their course on the more accessible shores of
Phœnicia. The Phœnicians have had the reputation of being the inventors
of letters because they introduced them into Europe; but they were the
mere carriers of them for commercial purposes, not the inventors.

Though some attempts have been lately made to prove that the Hebrew
nation has furnished more learned men than any other, the attempts are
an utter failure.

Curious wranglers, ingenious cabalists, fine splitters of hairs, shrewd
perverters of texts, sharp detectors of discrepancies, clever concocters
of analogies, finders of mysteries in a sunbeam, constitute the mass of
modern[41] Jewish scholars. What is the Talmud, the Mishna, the Gemara,
or any of their comments thereon, or on Scripture, but mere puerile
exercises of wit; sometimes ingenious, but always reckless of truth,
decency, or common sense? We search in vain, as far as our knowledge of
those works extends, and all who have studied them corroborate our
opinion, for any expanded views, any comprehensive ideas or extensive
learning. Neither does their ancient history furnish any but inspired
names, to class among the world’s sages.

Education is however rapidly extending among the Jews. For the first
time since they ceased to be a nation they appear to begin to feel the
importance of raising themselves to an equal intellectual rank with the
citizens among whom their lot is cast. This is the natural consequence
of the accordance to them of equal national privileges—a still further
extension of which, even to a seat in the Legislature, would promote
their further elevation in the social scale.

Numerous schools have recently been founded by them for the education of
their own people—both male and female—in England and other European
States. From these the most beneficial results may be anticipated.

It has always been found to be the greatest obstacle to the spread of
Christianity among a people who _à priori_ might be supposed to be the
most ready to receive it as a proof of the truth and fulfilment of their
own Scriptures, that they know not these Scriptures; but are either
immersed in the grossest ignorance, or glean their religion from the
Talmud and the Mishna. It has been justly said, “The Jews must be made
Old Testament Jews before they can be made Christians;” and this can
only be done by education among themselves creating a spontaneous spirit
of inquiry into their own literature, with an anxious desire to read and
comprehend the vast storehouse of Biblical treasure at present almost
unknown to the large majority of them.

The sources of our individual illustrations treating only of those who
have distinguished themselves in Literature or History furnish only a
few examples of the Jewish Nose.

                              Vespasian,
                              Correggio,
                              Adam Smith,

may serve, however, to illustrate and corroborate our theory. As to the
last, the connection between his Nose and the peculiar bias of his mind
is obvious.

“The founder of the Science of Political Economy” must have possessed a
natural attraction towards commercial affairs; and it could only have
been by a very large share of acute observation and shrewd penetration
that he could have worked out the principles of so abstruse a science,
and made it acceptable to the mass of mankind.

“It was,” says one of his admirers, “one of the few, but greatest,
errors of Adam Smith, that he was too apt to consider man as a mere
_money-making_ animal, who will never hesitate to work provided he is
well paid for it. He does not consider that the desire of power and of
esteem are more powerful principles than the desire of wealth.”

[Illustration:

  ADAM SMITH.
]

It is impossible to desire a description of his character more exactly
correspondent to the form of his Nose.

It has been much disputed among his biographers whether CORREGGIO was
rich or poor. Many anecdotes are related which indicate his extreme
poverty; while on the other hand, numerous facts seem to prove that he
must at least have been in easy circumstances. He married a lady of good
fortune, and he was well appreciated in his own time, and received many
valuable orders for paintings from patrons of high rank and great
liberality. It is however undisputed that his disposition was penurious
and miserly, and this fact—indicated also by his unusually
well-developed hawk-nose—will serve to reconcile the apparently
contradictory assertions of his biographers.

[Illustration:

  CORREGGIO.
]

It is probable that, like most misers, he was always complaining of
poverty, and even denied himself necessaries which he could have well
afforded. Those who credited these complaints, recorded his poverty and
lamented over it with mistaken kindness; while others, who more
critically considered his actual means, would better appreciate them and
reveal the true state of the case. There is an anecdote recorded of him
by his friend and cotemporary, Vasari, which though it may not be wholly
true, has probably some foundation. This characteristic anecdote is to
the effect, that having received a payment of sixty crowns in copper, he
carried it home on foot in sultry weather, and the over-fatigue brought
on a fever, of which he died. It is not, as Gibbon has shrewdly
remarked, of much importance whether an anecdote of a person is actually
true or false; for it almost equally displays the character of the
person of whom it is recorded. A tale of liberality is not told of a
known miser; nor an instance of penuriousness of a liberal man. An
anecdote, to be received, must at least be probable and have an air of
verisimilitude. Neither, considering the character of Correggio, is
there any such inconsistency in the story as to render it incredible.
The objection that sixty crowns in copper would weigh two hundred
pounds, and therefore be an impossible weight for a man to carry, is a
mere quibble. It only proves that the quantity is exaggerated, and not
that the main story is false.

The character of VESPASIAN has been painted in the brightest colours.
Avarice alone sullied his virtues. This must have been no slight or
temporary blot, or his eulogist and client, Tacitus, would not have
recorded it. It was too palpable and notorious to be concealed, and the
historian found himself, however reluctantly, compelled to confess it.

[Illustration:

  VESPASIAN.

  (_From a coin in the Museum of Florence._)[42]
]

It is not improbable, that he inherited this vice; for his father,
having saved money in the business of a collector of the revenue and
retired from the office, was unable to resist the love of gain, and
subsequently acquired a considerable fortune by lending money at
usurious interest. The prudence and sagacity with which the young
Vespasian regulated his conduct during the dangerous reigns of the
brutal Caligula and Nero, indicates his penetration and sagacity. It
must have been by no trifling tact and ingenuity that he escaped death
for the heinous offence of appearing inattentive while the Emperor Nero
was singing. The same shrewdness and insight into character enabled him
while in a private station to redeem his ruined fortune by
horse-dealing; a science always notorious for its unscrupulous scheming
and dishonest sharp practice; and in which the hawk-nosed Syrian Arabs
have ever excelled all other nations.

TITUS, the successor and son of Vespasian, inherited his father’s
profile, and it is a marked corroboration of our theory that avarice is
the only vice attributed to that otherwise virtuous prince.

It must, however, be observed, that the Noses, both of Vespasian and his
son, were not purely Jewish, but _Judæo-Roman_ IV⁄I; a formation which
corresponds accurately with other peculiarities in the character of
those great generals, too well known to need further elucidation.




                              CHAPTER VII.
                OF THE SNUB NOSE AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE.


 CLASSES V and VI.—The SNUB NOSE and the TURN-UP (_poeticè_ CELESTIAL)
                                 NOSE.

  The form of the former is sufficiently indicated by its name. The
    latter is distinguished by its presenting a continuous concavity
    from the eyes to the tip. It is converse in shape to the Jewish
    Nose. N.B. It must not be confounded with a Nose which, belonging to
    one of the other Classes in the upper part, terminates in a slight
    distention of the tip; for this, so far from prejudicing the
    character, rather adds to it warmth and activity.

  We associate the Snub and the Celestial in nearly the same category,
    as they both indicate natural weakness; mean, disagreeable
    disposition; with petty insolence, and divers other characteristics
    of conscious weakness, which strongly assimilate them (indeed, a
    true Celestial Nose is only a Snub turned up); while their general
    poverty of distinctive character makes it almost impossible to
    distinguish their psychology. Nevertheless, there is a difference
    between their indications; arising, however, rather from degree than
    character. The Celestial is, by virtue of its greater length,
    decidedly preferable to the Snub, as it has all the above
    unfortunate propensities in a much less degree, and is not without
    some share of small shrewdness and fox-like common sense; on which,
    however, it is apt to presume, and is, therefore, a more impudent
    Nose than the Snub.


It is with considerable distaste and reluctance that we approach the
latter divisions of our Classification. _Pœnitet me hujus Nasi._ We wish
we had never undertaken to write of these Noses. Having done so,
however, we must fulfil our engagement. But the mind shrinks from the
thought, that after contemplating the powerful Roman-nosed movers of the
world’s destinies, or the refined and elegant Greek-nosed arbiters of
art, or the deep and serious-minded thinkers with Cogitative Noses, it
must descend to the horrid bathos, the imbecile inanity of the Snub.

Perhaps the reader expects that we are going to be very funny on the
subject of these Noses. But we are not;—far from it. A Snub Nose is to
us a subject of most melancholy contemplation. We behold in it a proof
of the degeneracy of the human race. We feel that such was not the shape
of Adam’s Nose; that the original type has been departed from; that the
depravity of man’s heart has extended itself to its features, and that,
to parody Cowper’s line, purloined, by the bye, from Cowley:

            “God made the _Roman_, and man made the _Snub_.”

Fortunately for our hypothesis, and for our feelings, we cannot find a
single instance of the existence of either the Celestial or the Snub
among celebrated persons, except in those who are illustrious by
courtesy rather than by their actions, and whom station, not worth, has
made conspicuous. The following are the only instances of the Celestial
Nose which our pictorial sources furnish:—

                       James I.
                       Richard Cromwell.
                       Mary, wife of William III.
                       George I.
                       Kosciusko.
                       Boswell.

The “British Solomon” was unquestionably a witty man, without being a
wise one. In a subsequent chapter, we take occasion to observe, that the
exhibitions of character in women are, from different causes, diverse
from those in men; and that as to the Celestial Nose, a woman so endowed
appears more witty than a similarly nosed man, because she can dare to
say what his fear of corporeal chastisement would restrain. But kings,
by their position, are placed above such fear, and assume by their rank
what is granted to a woman for her sex. Hence the impudence of the
Celestial may develop itself in a king; and James I was enabled to utter
witticisms which he would have prudently kept within his breast had he
occupied an inferior station.

There are few individuals of whom more smart things are recorded than of
James I; but they are nearly all of a character which none but a
chartered libertine—a king, a fool, or a woman—dare utter.

Peculiar circumstances won KOSCIUSKO somewhat of a name, for it was
rather from sympathy with his cause than from admiration of his
abilities, that it was ever bruited in men’s mouths, or is yet
remembered. Had he been gifted with a Roman Nose, that is, had his soul
been Roman, energetic, dignified and self-reliant, Poland might have
risen again into the rank of nations. But he submitted to crouch beneath
the rod of Napoleon, temporizing and treating for benefits for which it
was his duty to have fought; and the nation, which looked to him for
assistance, was compelled to share his degraded fate, and become the
despised tool of an all-grasping despot. He had, however, a share of the
Cogitative with the Celestial; and thus affords an instance of an union
so rare, that it is only to be regarded as an exception to the rule laid
down, that Class III is never associated with V and VI.

[Illustration:

  KOSCIUSKO.
]

BOSWELL, who has attained that sort of eminence which a monkey might
secure by mounting itself on the head of an elephant, affords a striking
corroboration of all the characteristics attributed to the
Snubbo-Celestial Nose. What a contrast between his short, _retroussé_
nose and the profoundly Cogitative and well-developed proboscis of the
literary giant on whose broad shoulders he elevated himself, to display
his mountebankism, and the self-degradation of which his silly vanity
made him unconscious. It was the very excess of his self-esteem which
made him unconscious of the kicks and blows which his self-esteem was
continually doomed to receive at the hands of his “illustrious friend.”
His impudent vanity and blind obtuseness rendered him insensible to the
taunts and jeers, the ridicule and contempt, which were lavished upon
his imperturbable imbecility. The great moralist tolerated his presence
for the sake of his flattery, and the utility of his companionship when
no one else would familiarize themselves with the “literary bear.” Habit
made his presence essential; and Boswell—rather from natural weakness
than studied servility—was too useful a target for the arrows of the
cross satirist, to be lightly laid aside by one to whom disputation and
contradiction were necessary stimulants.

Every page in Boswell’s biography of Johnson demonstrates the _meanness_
of his disposition and the _weakness_ of his mind, redeemed only by a
certain _small shrewdness_ and _fox-like common sense_, very useful to
draw out the aphorisms of his patron. His inherent _impudence_ prompted
him to thrust himself into the society of the great literary characters
of the day, Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, &c., where his vanity and
self-esteem, coupled with his obtuseness of intellect, sustained him, by
rendering him as impervious to their sarcasms and rebuffs, as the hide
of the rhinoceros is to the darts which would speedily annihilate a more
highly organized and sensitive animal.

Nevertheless, the world owes much to Boswell’s imbecility. His mind was
a _tabula rasa_, on which were written down for our edification the
sayings of a great sage, pure and unalloyed, but which, if transmitted
through a mind of greater capacity, would have lost much of their
truthfulness and fidelity.

MURAT presents an instance of an illustrious Snub. But it is notorious
that Murat was never anything but a tool in the hands of Napoleon. He
was quite incompetent to stand alone. He was a peacock’s feather in the
hands of a juggler—veering with the directive motion and breath of the
skilful balancer. Where he was laid, there he lay; where he was set up,
there he stood. Such men were very needful to Napoleon. They were his
best puppet-kings, by which he hoped to govern Europe. Sometimes he made
a mistake, as in Bernadotte and his brother Louis; but Murat and Joseph
were most skilfully selected to obey his ambitious impulses. Perhaps—as
he is said to have chosen able men for their long noses—he selected
these for their Snubs. Murat especially rejoiced in a most egregious
Snub, and certainly exhibited no mental qualifications to belie the
inference to be drawn from that form of Nose.

It is an important and very obvious corroboration of the truth of
Nasology, that the noses of children are generally Snub or Celestial.
This arises from their minds being unformed, and their characters
undeveloped. As they grow up, their minds gradually expand, their
characters assume individuality; and, coincident therewith, their Noses
acquire the formation expressive of their mental tendencies.

In little children, Snub or Celestial Noses are beautiful, because they
are congruous with our ideas of the ductility and gentleness of
childhood. A child with a great Roman nose projecting from its rounded
cheeks and innocent eyes, would be an ugly child, though every feature
were individually perfect, because its nose would bespeak a force and
independence of mind which are revolting in a little child.

As we should recoil from a child which endeavoured to entertain us with
discourse suitable to a man of mature years, instead of with innocent
prattle, so we instinctively dislike in a child the features belonging
to manhood. The beautiful harmony which reigns throughout all the works
of Nature, is in nothing more manifest than in the congruity between the
mind and the features, especially in characterizing infantile and
undeveloped minds by infantile and undeveloped features.

For the same reasons that the Snub prevails among children, the same
form prevails among savage nations and the uneducated classes of
civilized states. The Noses of nations very low in the scale of
civilization are for the most part of a very flat and mean formation, of
which several instances will be adduced in a subsequent chapter; and the
Noses of the uneducated classes in every country exhibit for the most
part a greater proportion of Snubs and Celestials than the Noses of the
more highly educated portions of the community: and this is more marked
when the want of education has subsisted for several successive
generations.

From fictitious works, which have raised to celebrity imaginary
characters of every mental calibre, innumerable examples might be
adduced; for all accurate observers, whether ancient or modern,
have—without being professed Nasologists—unconsciously verified our
hypothesis, and associated the Nose with character.

The inimitable Dickens, and his equally clever illustrator Cruikshank,
both of whom owe their power to their correct observation and
delineation of character, afford many well-known examples. Had the
hypothesis been founded on Oliver Twist and its illustrations, it could
not have been more strikingly substantiated by them, than it is—thus
proving that if we err, we err in company with observers of more than
common accuracy, and whose observations have been verified by the
applauses of all. In that work we have the shrewd penetrative Jew with
his Hawk-nose; the mild, but high-minded Oliver Twist, with his fine
Greek Nose; the Artful Dodger and his brother-pals with their
characteristic Snubs and Celestials. A reference to the plates, and the
author’s pen-and-ink portraits, in this and other works, will confirm
our right to claim these artists in pen and pencil as Nasologists.

The same remarks would be equally applicable to Hogarth’s illustrations
of life in every grade. Observe the important use he makes of the Nose
to elevate or degrade his characters. Compare for this purpose the
Romano-Greek Nose of the Industrious Apprentice with the
Snubbo-Celestial Nose of the Idle Apprentice. Nor does Hogarth fall into
the vulgar error of ridiculing rank and station by features; with him
features indicate mind only. He used them to exhibit intellect and
honesty, or imbecility, vice, and vulgarity, in whatever station. The
Distressed Poet in his garret has a more intellectual nose and
countenance than the vicious and noble in Marriage à-la mode, or the
imbecile fop in the Rake’s Progress.

Raffaelle likewise avails himself of the Nose to give intellectual power
and dignity to the Apostles, Peter and John, in contrast with the
uneducated beggar whose lameness they miraculously cured at the
beautiful gate of the Temple.

Even the distinctive characters of the two Apostles are developed in
their Noses; the loving, confiding, gentle John by a Greek Nose, the
energetic and fiery Peter by a Roman Nose.

But why multiply instances when every accurate pourtrayer of character
furnishes abundant examples?

The only authority which we have consulted on the subject of Noses, is
one from whose works we have already quoted. It never can be forgotten
that the inimitable Tristram Shandy has slightly touched upon the
subject when describing the unhappy catastrophe which, even in his very
earliest years, demolished his Nose.

It appears that Mr. Shandy, senior, was a sagacious, an observant, and a
learned man. We need not add, therefore, that he was deeply impressed
with the importance of his son having a good Nose; and most pathetic was
his sorrow when the bridge of it was broken. His own family had suffered
through several generations from a defect in the length of an ancestor’s
Nose. His great-grandfather, when tendering his hand and heart to the
lady who afterwards consented to make him “the happiest of men,” was
forced to capitulate to her terms, owing to the brevity of his Nose.

“It is most unconscionable, Madam,” said he, “that you, who have only
two thousand pounds to your fortune, should demand from me an allowance
of three hundred pounds a year.”

“Because you have no Nose, Sir.”

“’Sdeath! Madam, ’tis a very good Nose.”

“’Tis for all the world like an ace-of-clubs.”

“My great-grandfather was silenced:” and for many years after the Shandy
family was burdened with the payment of this large annuity out of a
small estate, because his great-grandfather had a Snub Nose. Well might
Mr. Shandy (the father of Tristram) say, “that no family, however high,
could stand against a succession of short Noses!”

In lack of other instances, we have introduced those of fictitious
writers; for they corroborate our views, and serve to thicken other
proofs which in this Class do demonstrate thinly. And this necessarily
so. For we have determined to refrain from giving examples from our
personal acquaintance, and the Snubs have never any of them won such
eminence, as to have their names handed down by fame, or their portraits
limned for the benefit of posterity. The evidence in these two last
Classes is necessarily negative.

Their best proof lies in their want of proofs. They will, however,
receive some general illustration when we come to speak of national
Noses.


It now only remains to treat of some obstinate Noses which will not come
within our classification.

One of these is that curious formation, a compound of Roman, Greek,
Cogitative, and Celestial, with the addition of a button at the end,
prefixed to the front of my Lord Brougham. We are bound from its
situation to admit that it is a Nose, and we must, therefore, treat of
it; but it’s a queer one. “Sure such a Nose was never seen.”

It is a most eccentric Nose; it comes within no possible category; it is
like no other man’s; it has good points, and bad points, and no point at
all. When you think it is going right on for a Roman, it suddenly
becomes a Greek; when you have written it down Cogitative, it becomes as
sharp as a knife. At first view it seems a Celestial; but Celestial it
is not; its Celestiality is not heavenward, but right out into
illimitable space, pointing—we know not where. It is a regular Proteus;
when you have caught it in one shape, it instantly becomes another. Turn
it, and twist it, and view it how, when, or where you will, it is never
to be seen twice in the same shape, and all you can say of it is, that
it’s a queer one. And such exactly is my Lord Brougham—verily my Lord
Brougham, and my Lord Brougham’s Nose have not their likeness in heaven
or earth—and the button at the end is the cause of it all.

Thus, though Lord Brougham’s Nose is an exception to our classification,
it is not, as has been asserted, an exception to our system. On the
contrary, it is manifestly a strong corroboration of it. The only
exceptions are those where the _character does not correspond with the
Nose_, and of those we have yet to hear.

There is another Nose which is not included in the classification, but
which, though not peculiar to _one_ individual, is nevertheless not
sufficiently frequent to demand placing there. This we call the
Parabolic Nose. It would have been a good Nose if it had gone on as it
began; but having from some cause taken an inward curve too soon, its
good qualities become nearly nullified. It presents a continued
Parabolic curve, where it ought to extend into an angular tip. This
sudden abbreviation of course weakens the character, but, as it leaves
the good qualities of the upper part still inherent, the character
retains good points; but being disabled from reasoning justly on its
good intentions, it acquires the character of obstinacy, and of acting
from pig-headedness, instead of from rational forethought.

GEORGE III. presents the best-known example of this Nose.

Another striking example occurs in BLANCO WHITE. There were considerable
points of identity between their characters.

They were both honest, conscientious men, anxious to find out and pursue
the right course, but both were too hasty in jumping to conclusions to
form accurate judgments. Blanco White, anxious to embrace truth, led a
regular harlequin dance after her all his life, and died in motley. One
leg red and the other blue, with a jacket of various colours, and a
coxcomb of brilliant self-conceit. His last verdict, after rambling
through divers forms of religion and no religion, was, “I am neither
Trinitarian, nor Unitarian, nor yet Arian.” First Roman Catholic, then
Atheist, then Church of England, then Unitarian, then Arian, then
Omniarian, his ardent, hasty mind settled like a butterfly on the first
bright flower which fluttered in the breeze, for a time imbibed and
luxuriated on its honey, and then flew off to suck the sweets of some
other plant. Thus he fluttered on, a varied, anxious, unsettled
existence, gathering honey, but making none; and when the colds and
storms of winter came, he sank before them.

The instances of the Parabolic Nose are, however, too few among
celebrated persons to enable us to supply illustrations probative of the
accuracy of our notions of its indications. It is, however, by no means
an uncommon Nose, and from personal observation among our cotemporaries,
we should say that it is not a very desirable form, as we incline to
think that it indicates obstinacy without any great elevation of mind,
or deep capacity of reasoning. But it would perhaps, at present, be most
prudent not to express decidedly what are its indications, &c. Should we
be able to do so at any future time, it will be entitled to stand as
Class VII.




                             CHAPTER VIII.
                           OF FEMININE NOSES.


The subject of Nasology would not be complete without some observations
on the Feminine Nose, because sex modifies the indications, some of
which, though disagreeable and repulsive in a man, are rather pleasing,
fascinating, and bewitching in a woman, and _vice versâ_.

It is the fashion for women to aspire to equality with the other sex,
and as long as they will be content with an equality, in a different
orbit, they are undoubtedly entitled to it. It should, however, be the
equality of planets—each perfect and beautiful, each useful and
beneficial in its sphere; but pregnant with disorder and confusion when
Venus would invade the orbit of Jupiter, or intrude within the circuit
of Mars.

No intelligent man denies to woman such an equality; but as certainly as
a good housewife would pin a dish-cloth to the coat-tail of a husband
prying into the mysteries of the kitchen and claiming equality with his
wife in the household sphere, so surely will men cry out against and
turn with disgust from women who invade their province of warriors,
statesmen, merchants, &c.

Nevertheless, let us not be misunderstood, or be accused of including in
a sweeping clause those cases which are, of right, exceptions. A woman
may be placed in such a position that active life is her legitimate
sphere, and that if she neglects or devolves its cares upon others she
is culpable. We all feel an enthusiastic respect for the noble Boadicea,
arousing her pusillanimous countrymen against the cruel ravages of the
Romans, and dwell with admiration on Elizabeth haranguing her army at
Tilbury and personally engaging in affairs of State, because they were
occupied in duties which became a monarch; yet if a woman, who has no
call to any higher duties than those of domestic life, were to leave
them to engage in the contests of warriors or the turmoil of politics,
we should regard her as an unfeminine virago. Notwithstanding, though
the woman may in some cases be needfully sunk in the station, those
duties which become the former will still engage more of our love and
regard than those which belong to the latter; and our own graceful Queen
has secured, by her happy union of the duties of both, more of the love
and respect of her people than any of her predecessors on the throne of
these realms.

The energies and tastes of women are generally less intense than those
of men; hence their characters appear less developed and exhibit greater
uniformity. That their passions are stronger is undeniable, but these do
not constitute character, nor are exhibited in the Nose. Their indexes
are the eyes and mouth, and therefore their consideration forms no part
of the present subject. This uniformity of character is noticed by Pope
in a line which at first sight reads libellous, either because it
appears to refer to moral conduct—which it does not—or because it is too
sweeping and exaggerated. He asserts roundly,

                “Most women have no characters at all.”

No characters at all, is obviously false; but, as compared to men, as
near the truth as most general epigrammatic rules are. It is in the
latter sense that Pope used it to illustrate the difficulty of
discussing “The characteristics of Women” after a dissertation on those
of men. The line, however, was truer in his time than it is now, when
more general and more liberal education has tended very much to break up
the uniformity of character which existed among the inane ladies of
Pope’s era.

Nevertheless, whether repressed by Art or curtailed by Nature, women’s
characters certainly _appear_ less developed than those of men. If by
Nature, it is a blessed provision—as all nature’s providings are. It is
the woman’s place to be in rational subjection to the man; and though
the sweet saints would sooner tear out the eyes of St. Paul[43] (we
wonder he is such a favourite with them) than confess his precepts in
terms, yet they do not fear to acknowledge that they have no respect for
the man who succumbs to his wife, or admiration for the woman who
aspires to denude her husband of his appropriate symbols of masterdom.

If this happy inferiority—an inferiority which places them far above men
in practical wisdom, inasmuch as it consists in shrewd, practical common
sense, against a man’s intellectual blundering—if this happy inferiority
is the result of Art, they exhibit in its adoption much sound wisdom.
Man is an insolent, domineering, self-sufficient animal—let him _say_
what he will about the elevation of the female mind, we believe no man
ever fell in love with the woman whom he felt to be wiser than himself.
He could not endure for a partner for life, such a perpetual
looking-glass and reminder of his own infirmities; he could not bear the
constant attestation of his own weakness. He could regard patiently the
vaunted accomplishments of another man, but he could not submit that his
wife should be his acknowledged superior, and to be her foil—perhaps
fool.

Hence it is that wise men, so frequently that it is become proverbial,
marry silly women. However much a learned man may admire female
accomplishments, he detests a woman who strives to rival him in his own
sphere, who is talking philosophy when he would be whispering “soft
nothings,” and who freezes his ardent admiration with a dissertation on
mathematics, or a moral discourse on self-control. He can bend, like any
other man, with intense joy, over the blushing girl who tremblingly
believes that her eyes are brighter and more lovely than the stars over
her head; but would fling from him with disgust the woman who would
repress his harmless and true—because soul-felt—flattery, with a
philosophical disquisition on the nature, distances, and offices of the
aforesaid stars. And it is because learned women too often strive by
this injudicious ill-timed wisdom, to catch learned men for husbands,
(and there are no more determined husband-hunters than blue-stocking
women, because they are always within a year or two of being shelved),
that the latter are necessarily flung into the arms of women who they
know _can’t_ bore them with an eternal round of sense, from which every
one is glad occasionally to escape, and never more so than when he is in
love.

Hence it is that blue-stocking women are proverbially avoided by men;
not because men despise or dislike their learning, but because they make
such ill-timed use of it. They may be admired, but they are never loved;
they may talk as learnedly as is in their power, but learning never won
a lover, much less a husband. _Ver. sap._ my dear lady reader, and if
you don’t understand the abbreviate, ask—ask—anybody, but your husband.

               “Yes, Love, indeed, is light from heaven,
                 A spark of that immortal fire,
               By angels shared, to mortals given,
                 To lift from earth our low desire.”

And shall heaven-born love bow to mortal wisdom? Shall the God whom Jove
himself obeys, become the slave of Minerva? No! let Love wear the cap
and bells of Folly, but shroud him not in the cold cerements of the
Goddess of Wisdom! Be assured, the doves of Venus will never nestle
under the dusky wings of the sage owl of _innupta_ Minerva, who,
herself, could never win a husband, or a lover, from the whole host of
Olympus.

Whatever the cause, it is almost indisputable that women’s characters
are generally less developed than those of men; and this fact accurately
accords with the usual development of their Noses. But for a small
_hiatus_ in the prosody, Pope’s line would read equally well thus:—

                   “Most women have no Noses at all.”

Not, of course, that the nasal appendage is wanting, any more than Pope
intended by the original line that women’s characteristics were wholly
negative; but that, like their characters, their Noses are, for the most
part, cast in a smaller and less developed mould than the Nose
masculine.

In judging of the Nose feminine, therefore, comparison must not be made
with the masculine, but with other feminine Noses. All the rules and
classifications apply to the one as well as the other, but allowance is
to be made for _sex_.

The Roman Nose largely developed in a woman mars beauty, and imparts a
hardness and masculine energy to the face which is unpleasing, because
opposed to our ideas of woman’s softness and gentle temperament. In a
man we admire stern energy and bold independence, and can even forgive,
for their sakes, somewhat of coarseness; but in a woman the former are,
at the least, unprepossessing and unfeminine, and the latter is utterly
intolerable. Woman’s best sustainer is a pure mind; man’s a bold heart.

Moreover, the exhibition of character in women should be different from
that in men. From the masculine Roman Nose we may justly look for energy
in the active departments of life, but in a woman its indications are
appropriately exhibited in firmness and regularity in those duties which
legitimately fall to her lot. We do not desire to see a woman so
endowed, launch out, uncalled for, into the bustle and turmoil of the
world, or endeavour to take the reins of government from her husband,
though she may be equally well fitted for the task: but we are content
to see her govern her household with energy, and train up her children
in a systematic and uniform manner.

She will form her plans of household management with promptitude, and
carry them out with undeviating firmness and decision; and her husband
will act wisely, for his own sake, not to interfere with her, so long as
her energy does not carry her into his department.

But if woman’s circumstances place her in a more extended sphere, her
career will afford an example to illustrate our hypothesis as well as
that of a man. Of this we have an example in the illustrious Roman Lady,
LIVIA, the wife of Augustus.

Her Nose presents a combination of the Roman and the Greek, and contains
as much of the former class as is compatible with female beauty. The
accounts which are handed down concerning her are very contradictory:
some describe her as chaste as the icicle that hangs on Dian’s temple,
and qualified to lead a chorus of vestals, while others accuse her of
licentiousness and criminal amours. It is, however, undeniable that she
was a woman of considerable power of mind, which she exercised
energetically and shrewdly in procuring the aggrandizement of her son
Tiberius, on whose head she finally succeeded in placing the imperial
tiara. Her Roman energy was nevertheless refined by an infusion of Greek
elegance, and she was a liberal patroness of arts and literature. Her
career likewise illustrates another maxim; that what woman’s character
wants in development, is often compensated by superior passion. Livia
was sustained more by the strength of her affections than by personal
ambition. It was her son’s and not her own aggrandizement that she
sedulously pursued; and if the lives of the majority of ambitious women
were examined, it would be found that they more frequently sought to
exalt some object of their affections—a husband or a child—than
themselves.

[Illustration:

  LIVIA.

  (_From a coin in the Museum of Florence._)
]

This, however, was not the case with the purely Roman-Nosed ELIZABETH.
She had no affection for any one but herself; and the energy and
determination, combined with the coarseness of her character, correspond
accurately with the indications of her Nose.

The most beautiful form of Nose in woman is the Greek. It is essentially
a feminine Nose, and it is in its higher indications that women
generally excel.

This Nose will not carry them out of their natural sphere, and it is for
this reason that it is so beautiful. Congruity is harmony; and harmony
is essential to the beautiful. A woman gifted with the feelings of a
poet, need not fear to give them full sway. In some of the most
beautiful and touching departments of poetic talent women equal—perhaps
excel—men. Scarcely half a century has elapsed since women were
permitted to cultivate unreservedly the fields of literature, but that
brief period has incontrovertibly proved the ability of women to
pourtray with superior truth and pathos all that relates to the
affections, the sentiments, and the moral and religious duties of
mankind.

The names of Hannah More, Barbauld, Edgeworth, Tighe, Hemans, De Staël,
and other lamented writers, together with those of several who still
survive, place this assertion beyond the pale of controversy. The Noses
of the above-named gifted women were Greco-Cogitative.

[Illustration:

  MRS. HEMANS.
]

But the power of expression, though essential to a poet, is not
necessary to a poetic mind. It may exist as strongly in one who has no
words of fire to give its creations utterance as in one who pours forth
in lavish self-abandonment the riches of his soul.

            “Oh many are the Poets that are sown
            By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
            The vision and the faculty divine,
            Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”

                                                WORDSWORTH.

Neither is the Greek Nose a necessary index of a poetic faculty. That
form may adorn the face, but no rapturous fervour exalt the mind;
although it will frequently accompany a poetic temperament, because it
indicates refinement and purity of taste. These are its invariable
indications, and in these every woman so gifted will excel; for to excel
in these is almost her peculiar province.

In the minor and domestic departments of life, where woman’s influence
is so peculiarly blessed, the refinement of the Greek Nose will appear
in those household arrangements which make home the happiest and most
beloved spot on earth. It will exhibit itself in her needlework by an
artistic arrangement of colours and a poetic choice of subjects; in a
neat and elegant attire, in the decoration of her drawing-room, or in
the paraphernalia of her boudoir. Nor need it be confined to those
elegancies which seem to belong exclusively to the higher classes—a cup
of flowers in a cottage window, the well-selected trimmings of a Sunday
cap, or a pretty ornament on the mantel-shelf will equally be an
evidence of a refined taste, and found to accompany the Greek Nose.

The Cogitative Nose does not so frequently appear among women as among
men. Women rather _feel_ than think. Their perceptions are instinctive,
intuitive; men’s cogitative. They are shrewder and more instantaneous in
estimating character, or in deciding an action, than men. Men must
think, and fume, and fret, before they can decide; must, in common
parlance, set the head (reason) against the heart (instinct); while
women rely more on the latter, and are consequently, in judging of
character, or in deciding on a course of moral conduct, more frequently
right than men.

Our advice to a man would be this: if you are at a loss, after long
cogitation—as ten to one you will be—to know whether an intended act is
morally right, ask a sensible woman, and she will guide you with perfect
wisdom in a minute. So, again, if you would know any one’s moral
character, let a sensible woman converse with him for five minutes, and
she will tell you without fail whether he may be trusted. Only be
careful to accept her first dictum; don’t argue the point with her, nor
give her time to _think_; have her instinctive decision. If she thinks,
she will be ten times more at fault than a man; and, if you argue the
matter with her, she will lead you a dance through as fine a quagmire of
absurdities as can be conceived, and there leave you, up to your neck in
the slough, without the power—if not without the will—to help you out.
And this needfully so. Instinct must ever be a better guide than Reason;
for

  “In this (Instinct) ’tis GOD that acts, in that (Reason) ’tis man.”

“The perception of a woman,” says Sherlock, “is as quick as lightning.
Her penetration is intuition, almost instinct. By a glance she will draw
a quick and just conclusion. Ask her how she formed it, and she cannot
answer the question. While she trusts her instinct she is scarcely ever
deceived, but she is generally lost when she begins to reason.” A more
accurate picture of the female mind was never drawn; yet some modern
writers have fiercely controverted it. Under a mistaken notion of
equalizing women with men, they seek to destroy the individualism of
their character. One witty popular writer has even ventured to assert,
that if half-a-dozen boys were brought up as girls, and half-a-dozen
girls as boys, the latter would be to all intents psychologically men,
and the former psychologically women. Surely a more preposterous
absurdity never won the assent of the unthinking part of the community;
nevertheless, it has been warmly applauded and often repeated, as if it
were an ascertained fact instead of a ridiculous fancy.

The Jewish Nose is not very frequent among women. Neither are its
indications material to the perfection of the female character. It is
the duty of men to relieve women from the cares of commercial life, and
to stand between them and those who would impose upon their credulity.
Moreover, woman’s natural penetration supplies the want of the
thoughtful sagacity which protects men in inter-commercial relations.

The remarks which we made on the Snub Nose and the Celestial Nose in
men, require to be considerably modified when we treat of those classes
in women.

The Celestial Nose feminine is that which has won so much admiration and
celebrity among French writers under the designation of “_le nez
retroussé_.” They almost universally acknowledge its irresistible
piquancy and animation. According to Marmontel, “un petit nez retroussé
renvers les lois d’un empire;” a dictum which we are not disposed to
dispute.

We confess a lurking _penchant_, a sort of sneaking affection which we
cannot resist, for the latter of these in a woman. It does not command
our admiration and respect like the Greek, to which we could bow down as
to a goddess, but it makes sad work with our affections. The former,
too, is not so unbearable as in a man. It is a great marrer of beauty,
undoubtedly; but merely regarded as an index of weakness, it claims our
kindly consideration. Weakness in a woman—which is gentleness,
feminacy—is excusable and rather loveable; while in a man it is
detestable. It is woman’s place to be supported, not to support. Hence
the classical emblem of the Vine and the Elm is felt to be beautiful and
true, because it pourtrays accurately the natural mutual position of
husband and wife. A woman, moreover, has generally tact sufficient to
conceal (often to their entire annihilation) those unprepossessing
characteristics of the Snub and the Celestial, which in a weak man
become every day more and more strongly marked. A woman’s weakness, too,
is rather flattering, as it attests our supremacy; a thing which we like
to be constantly reminded of, and of which we are very jealous, as it
stands on rather ticklish and much disputed ground.

The impudence, too, which is utterly unendurable in a male Celestial,
and which seems to court contact with the toe of one’s boot, is in a
woman rather piquant and interesting. A Celestial Nose in a woman is
frequently an index of wit. Wit is a talent not emanating from wisdom;
quite the reverse. The wisest men are ofttimes the slowest. Wisdom comes
after thought, wit before it. A Celestial-nosed woman is only more witty
than a similarly gifted man, because the impudence which it invariably
indicates is backed by woman’s ever-ready tact and quickness.

The indications are not varied; but the exhibitions are. Even if a man
were gifted with the power of uttering the severe witticisms and cutting
repartees which are nectar and ambrosia from the lips of a pretty woman,
he dare not; for he would be inevitably kicked down stairs—if the fellow
were worth the exertion.

In a witty woman who can skirmish with unflinching quickness and
dexterity, we can even forgive a slight moral delinquency. A little
white-lie simpered out with arch assurance by a pair of demure lips,

                  “Like leaves of crimson tulips met,”

by no means offends us as it would in a man; in whom we should attribute
it to low cunning or mean cowardice. Indeed, the exquisite look of arch
impudence with which a delicately chiselled marble-ine Celestial tells
you a most palpable falsehood is maddening, perfectly beautiful, almost
sublime. The cool assurance and sharp raillery with which she persists
after detection! the assumption of injured innocence! the impudent look
of defiance! By Jove! truly

               “The dear creatures lie with such a grace,
               There’s nothing so becoming to the face.”

And then when they are beaten from their last defence, and can resist no
longer, when they are compelled to surrender and beg pardon, they do it
as if _they_ were forgiving _you_; and make you feel almost as if you
were being forgiven, as if you, not she, had all the while been erring:
at all events you feel very like a fool, though very happy; and so a few
tears, and a few (or not a _few_) kisses set all to rights,

                           “And so we make it up;
             And then—and then—and then—sit down and sup.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roars Mr. A. flinging down the book—which he has been
reading aloud to his wife—in a paroxysm of laughter.

“It’s abominable!” exclaims Mrs. A., in high indignation, “and I wonder,
Mr. A. you ain’t ashamed to read it.”

Mr. A. resumes the book, and his lady continues to listen with great
interest, though apparently wholly absorbed by her crochet-work.

All things considered therefore, and inasmuch as we prefer the
naturalness of a witty woman to the artificialness of a learned woman,
we confess to a liking for the Celestial Nose feminine, while we abhor
the masculine. It is not, however, every female Celestial Nose that we
admire (Heaven, for our peace’s sake forbid—they are so numerous). It
must be of the purest and most delicate chiselling; have no tendency to
cogitativeness, lest it should look as if its owner thought; and its hue
must be of the palest and most evanescent flesh-tint. These are
essential to indicate that delicacy of mind which alone makes wit in a
woman fascinating and which pardons breaches of strict morality
committed from the purest and most benevolent intentions.

This sounds rather paradoxical, but an old Jacobite song will illustrate
our meaning. The story goes that a gudewife concealed a north country
cousin, one of the adherents of Charlie, in the house, unknown to the
gudeman; and her ingenuity is sorely puzzled to account for certain
suspicious phenomena which strike him on his coming home:—

  “Hame came our gudeman at e’en,
    And hame came he,
  And there he saw a pair o’ boots,
    Where nae the boots should be.

  “‘And how came these boots here,
      And whase can they be?
  And how came thæ boots here
      Without the leave of me?’
        ‘Boots!’ quo’ she; (_with amazement_)
        ‘Aye, boots!’ quo’ he.

  “‘Ye auld blind dotard carle,
    And blinder mat ye be! (_indignantly_)
  It’s but a pair o’ water-stoups,
    My minnie sent to me.’
      ‘Water-stoups?’ quo’ he,
      ‘Aye, water-stoups;’ quo’ she.” (_with impudent determination_).

And so in like manner she unblushingly persists, in order to preserve
her guest’s life, that a saddle-horse is a milking cow, and a man’s coat
a pair of blankets. Now we are sure this dear woman had a Celestial
Nose; nothing else would have had the ready wit and impudent assurance
to attempt so to befool her gudeman, and to persist, with the addition
of no slight abuse of his dotard blindness, in her palpable falsehoods;
yet we defy any one not to love the good woman, and excuse her breaches
of morality for the sake of her hospitable benevolence.

Whenever two persons, the one having a large Nose and the other a small
one, come into collision, the latter must inevitably yield, unless it is
feminine, and takes a Celestial turn. It may then conquer, not by its
wisdom or the force of argument, but by its persevering impudence, and
harassing petty skirmishing. A wise man may, for the sake of peace and
quiet, ostensibly yield to a noisy woman; though there is no real
conquest, for he remains unconvinced.

But a Snub-nosed man must succumb, body and soul, to a Roman-nosed wife;
she will assume the masterdom; she will endue the breeches; he cannot
help himself; under her his nature is subdued, as Marc Antony’s was by
Cæsar.

Take warning, therefore, ye Snub Noses; and if ye would be masters at
home, marry your likes. Aspire not to wed feminine beauty; it is not for
such as you. Marry Snubs; beget Snubs, till the race is extinct.

We are conscious that in discussing female Noses, we are treading on
delicate ground. It is a difficult and nervous subject. We have
endeavoured, however, to say nothing but what appeared to us to be plain
truth. Nevertheless we would apologize if we have given offence to any
one, were it not that we forcibly feel the truth of the homely adage,
“the least said the soonest mended,” and therefore hasten to close a
chapter which has given us more trouble and anxiety than all the rest
together.




                              CHAPTER IX.
                           OF NATIONAL NOSES.


The reader will probably have been led from the nomenclature to inquire
whether the assertion that certain forms of Nose are justly named after
certain nations might not be extended further? and whether every nation
has not a characteristic Nose?

The reply to these questionings would be in the affirmative. Every
nation has a characteristic Nose; and the less advanced the nation is in
civilization, the more general and perceptible is the characteristic
form. While nations are in their infancy, and the mass of the people are
uninformed, the features receiving no impressions from within, take the
form impressed from without, and follow the national type. If one
uniform state of things—of government, climate, and habits—continue,
without education, generation may succeed generation, and the original
facial type of the race will remain. If, however, the national
circumstances alter (still without general education) the national
features follow the type impressed by those circumstances. We have
appealed to many instances of these simultaneous national changes when
describing the different forms of Noses prevalent at different periods
of English history.

The existence of such typical features has always been recognized, and
ethnologists have founded classifications of the Human Race on their
peculiarities.

It is an additional general proof of the truth of Nasology, that the
most highly-organized and intellectual races possess the highest forms
of Noses, and those which are more barbarous and uncivilized possess
Noses proportionately Snub and depressed, approaching the form of the
snouts of the lower animals, which seldom or ever project beyond the
jaws. Thus the Caucasian races, denominated by Dr. Prichard Oval-headed,
which comprise decidedly the most perfect specimens of the human race,
are characterized by a Nose Roman or Greek; while the lower divisions,
the Mongolian or Pyramidal-headed, and the Negro or Prognathous
(protruding-jawed)—than among which no lower and more debased specimens
of humanity subsist—have Noses Celestial or Snub, as in the Tartar and
Chinese, the Negro and Hottentot nations.

In the Caucasian, or Elliptical-headed, types of the Human Race, the
Nose averages one-third of the faces.

In the Mongolian, or Pyramidal-headed, the Nose averages from one-fourth
to one-fifth of the face.

In the Negro, or Prognathous-jawed, it is the same, and the nostrils are
conspicuous, as in brutes.

When hypotheses thus assist and strengthen each other, we gain an
assurance of their truth and accuracy which is wanting where they are
seemingly contradictory, and which would have been wanting to Nasology,
had it contradicted the observations of philosophers so careful and able
as Dr. Prichard and his fellow-labourers in the field of ethnology.
Happily this is not the case, and Nasology may claim to stand as the
handmaid of ethnologists striving to discover the characteristics of
nations.

Among the more highly-organized races more deviations from the original
typical patterns occur than among the lower-organized—because the minds
of civilized men are more impressible than those of savages. Travellers
have always observed that nothing struck them more on visiting a savage
nation than the great uniformity of feature, presenting so great a
contrast to the diversities among civilized nations; so that while a
superficial observer would suppose it to be impossible to characterize
the latter by any uniform description, he finds no difficulty in
expressing the characteristics of the former.

Various degrees of culture and occupation produce the greatest possible
variations among the individuals of civilized nations, while the uniform
absence of education and the uniformity of pursuits among savages
perpetuate, and perhaps confer, an uniform national physiognomy.

When education becomes general, nations lose their national typical
features; for the physiognomy becomes so variously impressed from
within, according to the different bias and affections of men’s minds,
that it ceases to receive those impressions from without, which generate
national types. At present, however, there is so little generally
diffused education that the typical features of most nations may yet be
defined.

These are not always the original types of the race. Numerous
circumstances have among the more civilized nations contributed to
produce changes of greater or less magnitude. The various Caucasian
nations, for instance, though all descended from one stock, have varied
from their original type in their divers migrations from the plains of
Asia, and received such typical form as varying circumstances have since
impressed. Hence the various Caucasian nations of Europe and Western
Asia differ considerably from each other in mental and bodily
organization.

These variations from the original type took place, however, at so early
a period, even in the ante-historical period, that historians are apt to
regard them as original and innate; and perhaps it is most convenient
for _them_ to do so. But this is not sufficient for the inquirer into
the Races of Men. He goes back to ages far beyond the historical, or
even the mythic, period; and, finding these nations are descended from
one family, perceives that the present variations must have taken place
after the dispersion of the family into distant localities under leaders
of very various temperament and views of social happiness.

It would lead us too far to inquire whether the tendency of Nature to
break up certain types into varieties, and form new races—perhaps even
new species and genera—was not originally greater than it has been at
any period within the knowledge of man. We see no changes take place
now, such as long before even the mythic period, produced from one stock
the wild urus, the domestic ox, and the hunched bull of India. Neither
do we see new races of men spring up; such as in the very earliest times
produced from one common ancestor the various diverse races of men;
white, black, yellow, and red.

It is a singular proof both of the tendency of the human race to break
into varieties at a very early period, and of the permanency of those
varieties in later ages—that the four races into which Blumenbach and
the best writers have agreed to divide the races of the old world are
distinctly recorded and separated in like manner on some of the most
ancient monuments of Egypt. On the tomb of Osirei, father of the Great
Rameses, are represented the “dwellers upon earth as well those of Egypt
as those of foreign countries.” Four figures are given in each group,
and are coloured to represent the Tawny, the Yellow, the Black, and the
White Races, respectively, with features corresponding to those of the
same races in the present day. Such facts should teach us that the laws
which regulate the generation and production of species and races are
very different from those which regulate reproduction and succession,
and that while we endeavour to explain the laws of origination by the
laws of reproduction, we shall never arrive at the true solution of the
origination of types.

It is no poetical fancy that Nature’s infancy was more active than its
later years; that “Nature wantoned in her prime,” and produced more
gigantic effects than now. Not that the powers of nature are weakened:
but the purpose having been accomplished, its workings are stayed by the
fiat of the Almighty God, and are employed in sustaining and
reproducing, instead of generating anew and creating. When those powers
are wanted again, they will spring into undecayed operation; let a new
continent rise from the deep and the new world have to be people, and
Nature will again resume the gigantic forces of its infancy, and become
young to fill with life and activity a young world.

But at whatever period impressed, certain it is that many nations have a
typical form of Nose, together with other peculiar distinctive features;
and it concerns us now rather to regard the fact as it exists than to
inquire how it happened.

The Roman, the Greek, and the Syrian forms of Nose have been already
descanted upon, as forming three bases of our nomenclature. The present
European nations are the Gothic, the Celtic, the Sclavonic, and the
Finnish.

The Gothic has been subjected to so many varying circumstances that it
is now perhaps impossible to assert, with confidence, its original
natural form. Where a uniform dull system of despotism, political and
religious, has for centuries bound down these nations in abject
servitude, the Nose is sharp, devoid of Cogitativeness, and Romano-Greek
in profile.

This is the case with the Spanish Goths and with those of France and
Italy. These nations were so long held in mental thraldom that they
ceased to cultivate cogitative powers which it was dangerous to use.
Where espionage and _Lettres de Cachet_, the Inquisition and Monachism
dog and punish men’s secret thoughts, and forbid the expression of any
sentiment breathing a spirit opposed to the powers that be, or
demonstrative of a disposition to inquire into the why and wherefore of
political and religious dogmas, the mind, by an instinct of
self-preservation, must cease to think. Where to think is a
death-warrant, where a look of reflection or an aspect of discontent may
be followed by the axe of the executioner, or the more fearful
incarceration by the gaoler, the mind has no alternative but to forget
itself and live in bestial oblivion, to “sit down to eat and drink and
rise up to play.” With the cessation of the Cogitative powers, the
Cogitativeness of the features will disappear, and the Nose will become
defective in breadth, thin and sharp. To this want of reflection
succeeds, in the naturally higher and more energetic nations, animal
passion; and if ever the pressure is removed from the national mind and
it obtain the upper hand of its keepers, fearful retribution and
sanguinary revenge inevitably ensue. They who lived the animal life of a
caged wild beast in apparent ease and quietude, well fed and perhaps,
sensually, better provided for than if left to their native freedom,
will, when let loose from confinement, fearfully vindicate the natural
law of liberty, and with an insane instinct tear in pieces the keepers
who have fed them for their own purposes and nurtured them for their own
pleasure and profit, reckless of the natural social rights of man.

It is for this reason that the sharp, thin unthinking Nose appears
symbolical likewise of cruelty; not so much because the natural
disposition is cruel, as because the mind, when unchained, acts from
animal impulse and not from sage reflection; and animal revenge is
always wild and cruel.

We say this of nations which, like the Gothic and other Caucasian races,
were originally well organized and endowed with higher capacities. This
higher organization exhibits itself—whatever the degrees of
Cogitativeness which incidental circumstances may have added, or
adeemed—in a profile, Roman, or Greek, or compounded of both; and which
may therefore be called nationally Romano-Greek. The profile not being
so subject to variation from the pressure of external circumstances as
the breadth, remains still pretty uniformly the same in all the
Caucasian races in Europe, which might be written I⁄II. Other races
there are which, either naturally of less penetrable stuff, and a lower
and more obtuse organization, or longer ground down beneath a more
crushing and uniform despotism, remain contented slaves and willing
bondmen. This degradation, as we shall see when we come to speak of the
Asiatic nations, appears also in their Noses.

France, Spain, and Italy have been depressed, not only beneath a
political despotism till within a very recent period, but under the
still more soul-crushing despotism of a gross superstition and corrupt
religion—the latter even more than the former has repressed
Cogitativeness in those nations. If there is one subject which more than
another interests the human mind and occupies the thoughts, it is its
religion—its eternal prospects—for Man is essentially a religious
animal. Debarred from exercising thought upon its most natural and
interesting topics—and all other subjects being dragged within the
jealous circle of a religious despotism—so stern a barrier is opposed to
thought that the mind rarely dare overleap it. While a political
despotism may be well pleased to see its subjects occupied in scientific
or metaphysical researches, in order to wean them from too critical an
examination of itself, a religious despotism forbids any such researches
unless made within the small circle it has prescribed. Death or
imprisonment awaits a Galileo or a Copernicus, as it would under a
similar rule, even now, await a Buckland or a Lyell.

At present, we lament that we can see nothing in the recent
revolutionary movements in France and Italy, to indicate the existence
of those Cogitative powers, the want of which has always hitherto
checked their advancement towards true liberty and self-government.

Now, as in 1793, there seems “equally a want of books and men; without
which, after a few years of bloodshed and anarchy, those countries must
again submit to a despotic form of government. No country can be
governed without intellect; and if that is not to be found in the many,
the few who possess it must become the ruler.

                                    “By the SOUL
            Only, the Nations shall be great and free.”

                                                WORDSWORTH.

This country has never long needed such a despotism. Germany, too,
though hardly yet freed from a political despotism, has through a large
portion of its area long thrown off the despotism of Rome, and embraced
the more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the Reformation. In
those provinces where this blessed change has taken place, Germany is
starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality which England
commenced three hundred years ago. The Germans and the English are
preeminently deep-thinking nations; and in both of them is the Nose more
decidedly and more generally of a Cogitative form than in any other
Gothic nations.

The Cogitative may therefore, perhaps, be said to be one of the
characteristic forms of the Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be
expressed thus, (I + II)/III. Nevertheless, various degrees of education
and various pursuits, with (in England) free institutions, have so
diversified their features that they exhibit a much less uniform
character than the features of most other nations.

The Anglo-Americans afford a further corroborative proof that the
Cogitative Nose is dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative mind.
They present a striking contrast to their puritan forefathers,—men who
abandoned home, country and friends for the sake of religious and
political opinions; men to whom conscience was dearer than life, and
freedom more precious than worldly advantage; men of the strictest
integrity, the most scrupulous honesty, and the sternest firmness,
sullied only by an excess of over-wrought feeling—fanaticism. All these
virtues, and this vice (itself a virtue gone mad) are wanting to the
American character. That there are happy exceptions, it is true; but a
nation which boasts _smartness_ as its most prominent virtue, must not
complain if it is accused of want of principle. The circumstances of
young America have contributed to render hers an unthinking people. The
wild life to which so large a portion have been subjected, cut off from
all neighbourhood, debarred from communication with cultivated minds,
thrown entirely on the active business of the day for mental food, they
have necessarily degenerated from the thinking men to whom they are
indebted for their origin.

So far from the American Nose inheriting the Cogitative form of their
ancestors’, it is thin and sharp; and, as a national nose, the most
unthinking of any of the Gothic stock. America is, however, a
fast-growing nation; it has had no infancy, but started at once into
life, a full-grown youth. There is hope, therefore—of which already some
assurance has been given—that it will yet furnish its quota of thinkers
to the history of the human mind.

Strange as the assertion may appear, it is susceptible of many proofs,
that the now degraded and dwindled Celts were originally the most
powerful and widely dispersed people of the earth, boasting
simultaneously a geographical extent and political importance, which
have been achieved only by successive generations of the Gothic branches
of the Indo-Germanic nations.

The Aborigines, Autochthones, Gigantes, Titanides (all which names
signify earth-born), Atlantides, Cyclopeans, Pelasgi, Umbri, Etrusci and
Sikeli, the Iotuns in Scandinavia, Pali in India, Kaous in Persia,
Hycsos in Egypt, may all equally, by plausible and unanswerable facts,
be surmised to have been Celts, with whom the immigrators of other races
waged continual wars for possession of the earth. All the myths—so
universal—of the wars of the gods and the giants, relate to wars between
the invading conquerors and the primitive inhabitants, who are
everywhere to be traced by their gigantic works of unhewn stone,
cromlechs, stone circles, &c., not referable to any historic period,
because the conquerors destroyed all records of their architects, and
then, in idiotic wonder at their vast dimensions, referred them to
gigantic first possessors of the earth.

Whether the original stature of the Celts was greater than that of the
Gothic nations, may be doubted; but it is a curious fact that nearly all
the modern European giants have been Celts, and immense stature was a
common property of the wild Irish of former generations.

The existing Celtic races call for more extended observation. As an
un-Gothicized nation, the Irish is the only remnant of a people which
probably was at one time thinly spread over the whole of Europe. Nearly
related to, if not originally identical with, the Goths, yet naturally
of a less vigorous constitution and lower habit of mind, the Celts
rapidly gave way before, or irretrievably amalgamated themselves with,
their Pelasgian invaders in Greece and Italy, and their Gothic invaders
in Trans-Alpine Europe.

Thus, at one time losing themselves in the overwhelming flood of their
invaders, like the waters of a lake inundated by the sea; at another,
retreating westerly before the oncoming torrent, the Celtic nations have
gradually almost disappeared from continental Europe, and alone find a
miserable home and wretched abiding-place on the most eastern shores of
the Atlantic, and the most western corners of the Old World.

If the Atlantic could have afforded them a footing upon its turbulent
waters, they would long since have been driven into it by their
rapacious invaders. The complaint of the unhappy Celts has, ever since
they were hunted to the extreme west of Europe, been the same, “Our
enemies drive us into the sea; and the sea drives us back upon our
enemies.”

Saxon ingenuity has, however, at last endeavoured to circumvent the sea.
If it cannot receive _into_ its bosom the last wreck of the Celts, it
can carry them _upon_ it to lands still further west, there to pine, and
dwindle away and die; out of sight, and therefore out of the mind, of
the haughty invader, who turns with well-feigned horror and disgust from
the ruin and degradation which he has wrought.

To make room for himself, he expatriates the ancient owners of the soil,
not only without remorse or compunction, but with much self-laudation
and pharisaical pride that he has not extirpated them, and has not—only
because he could not—adopted the ingenious idea of temporarily sinking
an island to purify it for his own undisputed use and enjoyment.[44]

Naturally, however, the Celtic is not a low-class race. It may not have
been originally so highly organized, or so mentally gifted as the
Gothic; but in its infancy it had virtues which long thraldom has
exterminated.

It is no fiction that Cæsar found the Gaulish and British youth more apt
than the Goths at acquiring the arts and language of Rome, and that, in
a few years, Roman civilization, more efficient than Saxon, had
converted Britain into one of the most fertile and well-ordered
provinces of the empire. It is no fiction that Rome found in Britain one
of the most determined opposers of its claim to universal dominion, and
that if it were to be

             “Asked, why from Britain Cæsar did retreat?
             Cæsar himself might whisper—he was beat.”[45]

It is no fiction that after British Christianity had been driven by
Saxon Paganism from Britain into Ireland, the Irish Celts furnished the
best schools for literature, and the ablest scholars in Europe—and it is
no fiction that ever since the Saxon has set foot in Ireland it has
continued to droop and decay, until it is now a foul bog of iniquity; a
wretched irreclaimable sink of inhuman vice and monstrous infamy.

Its Cogitativeness has been repressed till it cannot reflect nor
appreciate any but physical modes of escape from thraldom. This is but
the caged wild beast gnawing at its chain, and snapping at its keeper,
whether his hand approaches to feed or to beat it.

It may be said, escape lies open to it in self-elevation, in moral
rectitude, and industrious exertion; but it is too late for it to see
and understand that. We might as well say to the broken leg, walk now,
you walked once; or to the encaged madman, calm yourself and be free,
you were calm and free once.

We need no better proof of the non-cogitativeness of Ireland than the
facile manner in which it throws itself beneath the Juggernautic car of
every demagogue, and sacrifices itself to his avaricious cruelty. We
need no better proof of the truth of our theory, than that the Nose of
the same nation is deficient in Cogitativeness, and is for the most part
thin and sharp. It has not, however, lost the Romano-Greek profile,
usual among the Caucasian races.

This is true in the main; but unhappily more recent information compels
us to modify it, and add another proof of Nasology from degradation of
physical structure simultaneously with mental degradation. “There are
certain districts in Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo” (as pointed out by an
intelligent writer in the Dublin University Magazine, No. 48), chiefly
inhabited by descendants of the native Irish driven by the British from
Armagh and the south of Down, about two centuries ago. These people,
whose ancestors were well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, are now
reduced to an average stature of five feet two inches, are pot-bellied,
bow-legged, and abortively featured, and are especially remarkable for
“open projecting mouths, with prominent teeth, and exposed gums, (_i.
e._ prognathous-jawed—the Negro type), their advancing cheekbones, and
_depressed noses_, bearing barbarism on their very front.” In other
words, within so short a period, they seem to have acquired a
prognathous type of skull, like the savages of Australia, “thus giving
such an example of deterioration from known causes, as almost
compensates by its value to future ages, for the sufferings and
debasement which past generations have endured in perfecting its
appalling lesson.”[46]

The study of the British Legislature should be “How to get” Ireland a
Cogitative Nose; not by any surgical process, such as that of the

                   “Learned Taliacotius, who from
                   The brawny part of porter’s bum,
                   Cut supplemental Noses.”—HUDIBRAS.

for phlebotomizing is the worst mode of legislation—but by cultivating
in her people a Cogitative mind; well assured that whether or not the
attempt succeed in developing their probosces, it will be well repaid by
other and more important improvements in their condition. How this is to
be effected would afford matter for an interesting essay; but it would
be out of place here, though we have our nostrums on the subject like
every other political doctor, and cannot resist saying that it will
never be done by “Constitutional” Legislation, which is only fitted for
the Teutonic races. The Irish, like the cognate race, the French, must
be governed by an enlightened despotism; they must be gently pushed on
by their leaders to their own good, while the Teutonic races may be
safely left to push on their leaders—treading, not always too gently, on
their heels, by way of hint to get on. It is a most fatal error in
legislation to disregard the psychonomic differences in races, and under
a philanthropic pretence of the natural equality of man, to endeavour to
govern all by the same laws and institutions.

It was the sad misfortune of Ireland to be conquered after the downfall
of the feudal system, and to be at once inducted—with sanguinary and
therefore ineffective restrictions on their use—into free forms of
government. The feudal system, in its original integrity—without its
on-grafted abuses, as fines, heriots, &c. &c.—is almost the only system
on which a naturally high-class but barbarous race can be held down,
while they are being elevated in the scale of humanity; and if for three
or four generations Ireland could be subjected to pure and beneficent
feudality—whereby every man would be linked to a superior, and be
compelled to exert himself to retain his feud—together with the Alfredic
tithing-man system—to prevent or detect and punish crime—it might be
gradually placed on such an equality with England, as to enable it to be
safely governed on the same constitutional principles. Perhaps, however,
it is rather to be wished that this had been done in past times, than to
attempt it now: it might be dangerous to the liberties of England to
retrograde; for it must be admitted that a return to feudality is
retrogression, and the state of external peace to which it would bring
Ireland might afford an argument to future English Legislatures, to tie
down the turbulent liberties of England with the same bonds—which God
forbid! better live in a storm than rot in a calm.

It is the unhappy fate of Ireland that its evils are past remedy. Her
woes are the executioners of God’s judgments against England for the
latter’s crimes towards her. Ireland suffers that she may be a sharp
thorn in the side—perhaps a dagger in the heart—of England. No nation
sins without retribution from the quarter against which the crime has
been committed, and much more evil must England suffer from Ireland ere
an equivalent punishment has been inflicted. Nevertheless Ireland is not
wretched only because England must suffer; she is wretched for her own
crimes, and her wretchedness is over-ruled to be the punishment of her
oppressor likewise.

This is by no means an isolated instance of the duality of purposes in
the Divine judgments. The crimes of a nation have ofttimes been made the
punishment of itself and another; so likewise, among individuals, the
visitation of one man’s sins frequently extends to punish the faults, or
try the virtue, of his friends and relations.

The ambitious pride of Babylon punished the idolatry of the Israelites,
but at the same time brought down ruin on itself. The conquest of
America punished the gross vices and savage idolatries of the natives,
and at the same time retributed the cruelties and crimes of their
punishers by inundating Spain with the gold and silver which has wrought
her present degradation. May we not add that England’s punishment of the
revolutionary crimes of France, is now retributing her own commercial
jealousy, and wild interference in Continental politics, by clogging her
with debt, and raising a host of European rivals to her claim for
universal commerce.

The lowest organized race of any consequence in Europe is the Sclavonic.

The Sclavones came into contact with Roman civilization earlier than the
Goths; but, unlike the latter, they retired to their settlements without
carrying away any portion of the manners and habits of the people whom
they invaded. Even yet they are but little advanced, since that early
epoch. At least till within the present century, the Russian noble, as
well as his serf, led the life of a pig, eating, and drinking, and
sleeping. Wallowing in filth, insensate with brandy, and degraded by
lust, the Russians of various ranks differ only in the size and
splendour of their respective styes. To enter with minuteness into the
daily habits of all classes of both sexes would be to present a picture
which we should revolt from drawing, and the reader from beholding.

The Snubbo-Celestial form of the Sclavonic Nose stamps its character
irretrievably, and accords remarkably with the description of the
Sclavonic mind given by Kohl and other recent writers:—“Inconsistent and
unstable—wanting in the creative faculty; but we cannot deny them a
marvellous aptitude for all kinds of work, and an extreme facility of
imitation.”[47] This is just the description a farmer might give of his
horse, or a fine lady of her monkey. “The hope of Europe,” says the same
author, “from Russian power consists in its total want of vigorous
characters, mighty minds, and moral energy.” The pictures which the
lively writer Kohl gives of the Russians—their ‘small shrewdness and
fox-like common sense,’ their impudent acknowledgment of their shameless
cheating and pedlaring dishonesty—accord literally with the indications
which we have ascribed to the Celestial Nose; but we must refer the
reader to his work on Russia for endless confirmations of our assertion.

Russia may rise above its present animal degradation, but it will never
take a high place in the history of civilization. It may be doubted
whether it will ever take any station there at all, except when in some
future and long distant age, it is recorded, that, like Asia and Africa,
Europe fell from its palmy state, and became a heap of ruins before the
furious desolation of barbarous swarms from the north.

Napoleon said, with the prophetic vision of old experience, for

                   “Old experience doth attain
                   To somewhat of prophetic strain,”

that in fifty years Europe would be Republican or Cossack. He only erred
in using the disjunctive; for it does not require much penetration to
foresee that, at no very distant period, Europe will be both—first
Republican, and then, when thus prostrated at the foot of the first
powerful despot—Cossack.

For this purpose, it is probable the Sclavonian nations, with hordes of
Mongolian Calmucks, and Tartars—the σιμοὶ, or flat-nosed nations of
Herodotus—are gathering force and increasing in their vast plains and
desolate forests. The scourge of Europe—once the scourge of Asia—is
being prepared slowly but surely; and when civilization shall have taken
a firm hold of America and the new continents gradually being built up
in the Pacific, Europe, having fulfilled its part in the world’s
history, will be swept away, and become a byword and a scorn among the
nations—‘Ichabod’ will be written on its temples, and the bittern and
the owl shall inhabit it; the wild beast of the desert shall lie there,
and the dragons in its pleasant palaces.

The Finnish race presents a remarkable proof of the variation in
physiognomy attendant on variation in mental capacity, occasioned by
change of circumstances—as government, climate, and habits. The ancient
Huns, the modern Hungarians, and the northern Finns and Lapps of the
shores of the Bothnian Gulf and the White Sea, are all of the same race;
and yet differ widely from each other in physiognomy and psychonomy.

“Few races exhibit greater or more remarkable differences in mental
cultivation, and in the direction of their passions, according as they
have been determined by the degeneration of servitude, warlike ferocity,
or a continual striving for political freedom, than the Finns. In
evidence of this we need only refer to the now peaceful Finns of the
north, to the Huns, once celebrated for conquests that disturbed the
then existing order of things, and lastly, to a great and noble
people—the Magyars.”[48]

The differences between those races took place within the historic
period, and afford a striking instance of the effect of external
circumstances in modifying the mental and corporeal features.

The fierce and savage Huns, who overran a portion of the Roman Empire
under Attila in the fifth century, differed wholly from the Finns now
existing in Europe. So misshapen were their features, and so hideous
their aspect, so savage and demoniacal their warfare, that the terrified
Goths could not believe them to be born of woman, but asserted them to
be the unnatural offspring of demons and witches in the fearful
solitudes of the icy north. One of their distinctive features was a flat
depressed nose, plainly indicating their low organization.

Although the Finns and Lapps retain the flat nose—never having emerged
from barbarism—they are a mild, gentle, meek-spirited race, presenting
few features which seem capable of amelioration.

The Hungarians, on the other hand—in whom, however, we must suspect a
large infusion of Gothic blood—are a bold, independent, noble-minded,
and highly intellectual people; characteristics which exhibit themselves
in a noble Roman Nose, and a countenance bespeaking the independence of
their minds.

We may next advert to the characteristic features of a few of the
Asiatic nations.

Perhaps no nation displays a more universal dead level and general
sameness of feature than the Snub-nosed Chinese. Notwithstanding the
great varieties in climate and soil which prevail in that extensive
Empire, and the correspondent variations which must be made in domestic
habits and style of living, a remarkable identity of feature prevails
among all classes of every province. The faces may be said to be all
cast in the same mould; and one could wish that Nature, when she made
the first cast, had—as she is reported to have done when she made a
certain beautiful female, whose name we forget—broken the mould before
she produced any more casts from it. Perhaps, however, we belie the good
old dame in attributing the production of this, or any other equally
ugly countenance, to her. It is rather the degraded form into which a
despotism of unknown duration and unexampled soul-depressive powers has
converted the original type.

A form of government more admirably arranged to keep the people in a
state of childhood has never been modelled than that of China. The
wisdom of its arrangements for securing the permanent despotism of the
ruler is undeniably proved by its long and peaceable subsistence. To
rebel in China is the heinous crime of filial disobedience: it is not,
as in Europe, a political crime merely, it is also a moral crime of the
same class as murder or theft. Unless we can imagine a nation by
universal assent throwing off the bonds of morality, and living in
confessedly gross crime, we can form no conception of the Chinese
rebelling. It would present the unnatural and inconceivable state of a
nation of parricides and disobedient children.

Every superior in China, from the Emperor to the military officer or
civil Mandarin, is “a father;” all under him are his “children,” and as
such must obey him without question or demur. “Filial disobedience,”
whether to parents or governors, is the highest crime. Filial
disobedience is thus defined:—“In our general conduct not to be orderly,
is to fail in filial duty; in a Magistrate not to be faithful, is to
fail in filial duty: among friends, not to be sincere, is to fail in
filial duty: in arms and war, not to be brave, is to fail in filial
duty.” A people thus treated as children, must ever remain in a state of
childhood; and though education is general among the Chinese, it is an
education which, like the bandages on their women’s feet, binds their
minds _from_ growing, and restricts them to the size and calibre of
infancy.

Education in China consists solely in social and political training for
the purposes of despotism. The studies are confined to one unvaried
routine, and no deviation from the prescribed track is permitted. Within
this circle all are, and must be, educated. Hence an uniformity of mind
prevails, and has prevailed for ages throughout China, and has extended
itself to the national features; betraying itself in Snub Noses and a
dull, stolid expression of countenance. So much for compulsory
education! It is impossible that it should be otherwise.

A nation whose minds are all reduced to the same level; whose thoughts
are prescribed; whose daily conduct is measured out; whose very
amusements are dictated by an imperial will, must necessarily soon
become uniform, both mentally and physically. This uniformity will be
the waveless level of the Dead Sea. Storms may agitate the upper sky,
winds may rage, and floods descend; but the waves are too heavy to rise
from their death-like repose. They sleep the calm sleep, not of peace,
but of death. The last trumpet alone can arouse their torpor. The
benignant mind of the Christian may nourish sweet hopes of evangelizing
a nation so sunk. but the hopes are vain. Christianity came not till the
human mind was fitted and prepared to receive and understand its divine
precepts. It came not to the infancy of the world, but to its old age
and matured judgment. A nation, therefore, steeped in the irreclaimable
dotage of a childhood which has endured throughout its whole life,
cannot receive it. Both the Hindoos and the Chinese have forfeited by
their long-lived puerility the blessed message.

The first and every subsequent step of Christianity, as of civilization,
has been Westward. Neither can they ever return to the East. The Apostle
of the Gentiles preached from Judea to Pamphylia and Galatia, but was
forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word in Asia;[49] and when he
assayed to go Eastward into Bithynia, the spirit suffered him not, but
compelled him westerly into Macedonia. From Macedonia to Rome; from Rome
to Gaul; from Gaul to Britain; from Britain to America and Polynesia,
the course has still ever been uniformly westward.[50] A few isolated
Christians may be made in Asia; but it will never be Christianized. Asia
has performed its part on the world’s stage. It is dead out, and cannot
be resuscitated. When Christianity is entertained by “all nations,” Asia
will be no more. It will not be reckonable among the nations, even as a
dead man is not among the living. This may seem a harsh judgment. But is
it harsher that nations whose own degradation unfits them for
Christianity, shall remain ignorant of it during the brief remainder of
the world, than that they have been ignorant of it for nearly two
thousand years?

It is not for man to judge God, and to say that his ways are unjust. We
must not deny the fact because we cannot comprehend it. We cannot tell
by what crimes Asia has forfeited her part in the New Covenant of Grace.
It may be because she rejected the first dispensation, and flagrantly
violated the Old Covenant of Works. To Asia, the mother of mankind, the
blissful seat of our first parents, the nurse of the renovated human
race, were given the first pure, simple precepts by which Man was taught
to obey his God as a child obeys his parent. How soon she flung off this
obedience and rejected her Great Teacher let history, both sacred and
profane, attest. Long ere Asia sent forth peoples and nations to
replenish other quarters of the earth, these original precepts had been
obscured and obliterated by idolatry and polytheism. A lesser crime,
therefore, attached to these mis-instructed offsprings than to the
misteaching mother. A second dispensation was therefore revealed to
them, but forbidden to her. So far man might think he comprehended the
divine purposes without impugning God’s wisdom and justice; yet he may
err, and his frail musings be but the cogitations of the flea which
reasons on the movements of the elephant, whose back is his universe.
This should be the humble reflection of all who strive to justify the
ways of God to man. We know but in part, and we see but in part, and
therefore cannot judge of Him who sees and knows the whole.

We have incidentally mentioned the Hindoos as partaking in the mental
degradation of the Chinese. But, nevertheless, they are not nearly so
degraded a race, nor have they so general an uniformity in their
features, nor so low a formation of their Noses. India has been
subjected to less uniformity of despotism than China. While to the
dominant system of the latter we can assign no limit, we find in that of
the former numerous epochs when important changes have taken place.

Fierce religious wars, frequent foreign invasions, domestic feuds and
intestine warfare have kept the Hindoo mind more on the alert than that
of China. Assyria, Egypt, Scythia, Greece, Persia, and Britain have at
different epochs overwhelmed India. Idolatrous Monotheism, Polytheism,
Mahometanism and Christianity have, in turn, violated its shrines, and
endeavoured to overwhelm both Buddha and Brahma. Buddha and Brahma,
Vishnu and Siva, have striven to overthrow each other; but while the
country has been desolated, the people have been saved from sinking into
the uniform degradation of the Chinese. Nevertheless, under each and
every system, despotism has prevailed in India; no free institution has
ever flourished on its plains; and, therefore, despite the stirring
events which have excited it, it has never risen again to that high
station which its people must have held among their contemporaries when
they sculptured the caves of Elephanta and Ellora, and raised the
pyramidal pagodas of Tanjore and Deogur.

These gigantic works sufficiently attest that the inhabitants of India
are not naturally of a low-class race. Forty thousand men labouring
incessantly for forty years would hardly suffice to excavate and
sculpture the cavern-temples of Salsette alone. Yet those form but a
small portion of similar gigantic works of the same age.

No mean-minded men raised fanes such as these to the Deity. Energy of
the most vigorous character, talent of the highest rank, and devotion of
the noblest nature, could alone have dictated and executed structures
which outvie in magnitude the boldest efforts of modern genius. In
comparing them with the latter, we should moreover recollect that they
were the first efforts of the human race; made without pattern, designed
without exemplar, and commenced and carried out without experience.

How different must those men have been from the soft and effeminate
Hindoo who has forgotten in the mist of ages these shrines of his
fathers, and abandoned them to ruin and decay; and who, conscious of his
own utter inability to achieve or conceive their equals, ascribes their
formation to giants and demigods. And they were different. The same
race, but different men, different in features as in minds. While the
profile of the modern Hindoo is soft and effeminate, and the Nose short
and rounded (parabolic), the ancient sculptures demonstrate that the
profile of their earliest progenitors was manly and decided, and
identical with that of their descendants, the Indo-Germanic nations, in
Europe. One well-known instance will suffice. The Trimurti or
three-headed deity in the caves of Elephanta.

This is a sculpture of the most remote antiquity, but the dress, the
beads, the sacred cord and other religious symbols declare it to be the
work of Hindoos. In anthropomorphising the Deity, men always adopt their
own typical countenance for that of their God. Hence their idols betray
the national features. Now, observe the profiles of Vishnu and Siva in
this Trimurti. The face of the former, the good and beneficent
“Preserver,” the friend and mediator for man, is a purely Greek face;
the Nose straight and well-defined. It has none of the air of the modern
Hindoo countenance. Much less has that of the energetic and terrible
Siva, “the Destroyer.” The Nose is of the most energetic form; it is a
fine Roman Nose, aquiline and rugose. If phrenologists are permitted
from similar facts to say that the Greeks—who were but children to these
Hindoo artists—were phrenologists, surely we may venture to say that
even at this very early period the Hindoos were Nasologists.

[Illustration:

  THE HINDOO TRIMURTI.
]

But in the wide nostril of Brahma we also perceive the Cogitative form
of Nose, so necessary to indicate the wisdom of Brahma, “the Creator:”
who, though now he rests, having consigned the inferior office of
Preservation to Vishnu, was the first emanation from the supreme Brahmè,
and by whom and from whom all creation proceeded. With the exception of
the head in this Trimurti, Brahma has no idolatrous representations, for
it is said in the Vedas, “Of Him whose glory is so great, there is no
image. He is the incomprehensible Being which illumines all, delights
all, and whence all proceed.”

Sir William Jones mentions, in one of his discourses published in the
Asiatic Researches, the existence of a small nation in India which
appears distinct from the Hindoo race. The people comprising it he
describes as shrewd, clever tradesmen, enterprising merchants, acute
money-lenders, and notorious in India for their aptitude for commerce.
Their countenances, he adds, are what are called Jewish, and hence he
concludes that they constitute a portion of Jews, who either at the
dispersion of the Ten Tribes, or at some other very early period,
settled in India. It is surprising that the acute President should have
so hastily jumped to such a conclusion from the foregoing premises; for
he adds a fact which seems most decidedly to negative it. This people,
he tells us, have not the slightest trace of any Jewish traditions,
belief, or customs among them. Now it is a familiar fact that the Jews,
wherever dispersed, or however long separated from their brethren, have
invariably retained a very large proportion of the inspired precepts
revealed to regulate their religious, moral, and social conduct; and it
must demand the most precise and indisputable evidence to justify the
classing any people as Jews, who have lost all traces of the manners and
customs of that singular nation.

For these reasons we do not hesitate to say that the two facts on which
Sir W. Jones founded his hasty hypothesis, viz. the commercial character
and the Jewish physiognomy of this Asiatic tribe, afford by their
coincidence only a remarkable and curious confirmation of our
Nasological theory, and as such, we here gladly insert it.

We have said that the Jewish Nose should more properly be called the
Syrian Nose; but have reserved, until this place, some of the
corroborative illustrations.

The Syrian Arabs, as descendants of Abraham, through the wild son of
Hagar, inherit the physical, and many of the metaphysical, features of
the Hebrew nation.

Destined, by the promise of God, to become a great nation, the Arabs
founded one of the most extensive kingdoms of the earth, and for many
centuries swayed an empire more extensive than that of Rome in her
fullest prosperity. For twelve hundred years, a larger proportion of the
inhabitants of the earth have devoutly obeyed the precepts of the
Arabian prophet, than have knelt at the altar of any other individual
creed; and, though Mahometanism is perhaps doomed to fall before
Christianity, it cannot be regarded in any other light than as a minor
dispensation, and an inferior blessing conferred by Providence on a very
large proportion of His people.

Christians who yet recognize the finger of God in every sublunary
affair, would shrink with horror if asked to recognize in Mahometanism a
Providential dispensation; yet, whether we regard it as a religion which
annihilated the grossest idolatries, abolished human sacrifices,
exterminated the vilest obscenities, and substituted a nearly spiritual
worship of One God, over the largest and fairest portion of the
earth,—or as the religion of a nation, whose ancestor God blessed, and
promised to “make a great nation,” and “to multiply exceedingly, that it
should not be numbered for multitude;” and who, in token thereof,
received the seal of circumcision—to this day retained, as among the
Jews—it is difficult not to see in it the finger of God, or to deny that
the pseudo-prophet of the sons of Ishmael was an unconscious instrument
for good in His hands.

But this is a topic not needful for us here to enter fully upon. It is
more to our purpose to remark upon the psychonomic features of the
Arabs, while in the zenith of their promised glory as a nation;[51] when
the Caliphs of the East ruled as Priest and Potentate over more than
two-thirds of the known globe.

During this glorious period of their power, the Arab character shone out
uncontrolled in its true features, and exhibited itself as it had never
done before, nor since.

True to its parentage, but unshackled by the stringent laws and
anti-social ceremonies of its more favoured brother, it rioted in all
those tastes and pursuits which the latter delighted in, but was
restrained from; and became celebrated for a splendour which was
rivalled by that of Solomon alone, and a traffic which far outvied that
of all contemporaries or predecessors—except, perhaps, the cognate
nation—the Phœnicians.

Rich in barbaric pearls and gold, and boasting all the wealth of Ormuz
and of Ind, the court of the Caliphs verified the visions of the
“Arabian Nights;” which, if true, were true here only. All the gauds and
trinkets, the golden palaces, the jewelled walls, the glittering roofs,
in which the other branch[52] of the Hebrew nation displayed their
highest ideas of magnificence, shone resplendent in the halls of the
Caliphs.

But as to the boasted literature of the Arabs, it resolves itself into
an ardent pursuit of physical science—astronomy, chemistry, and the
mechanical arts, for nearly all the more important of which we are
indebted to the Arabs; not, however, as inventors, but as carriers, like
the Phœnicians. In the higher departments of literature, the Arabs made
no progress. Metaphysical disquisitions and intellectual pursuits were
repugnant to their tastes, which rather delighted in the physics of
Aristotle than the metaphysics of Plato.

Nor were they less true to their nasal development in their success and
skill in commercial pursuits. The commerce of Arabia, for several
centuries, encircled the whole known world. From the frigid shores of
Scandinavia, from the torrid sands of Africa, from silken Cathay, from
jewelled Ceylon, from vine-clad Europe, from spicy Araby, flowed the
rich streams of produce. The amber of the north was exchanged for the
gold of the south; the wines of Spain for the silks of China; the pearls
of Ceylon for the slaves and gold-dust of Africa; and a commerce now
excelled only by that of England, carried arts and literature from one
end of the Old World to the other, and was mainly instrumental in
raising the more highly-organized nations of Europe from barbarism to a
physical and intellectual splendour hitherto unknown.

But from this glorious reality, the Arab has sunk into a wretched,
irretrievable lethargy. Like the Jew, he has been weighed in the balance
and found wanting; the cup of promise has been held to his lips, and he
has refused, or polluted the blessed draught. They have been called, but
would not come, they would have been gathered together as tender
chickens under the wings of the hen, but they would not; and “behold,
their house is left unto them desolate.”

Neither Arab nor Jew shall ever again revive, till they join with the
whole earth in one universal cry, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name
of the Lord!”

It has been said that Christian intolerance has driven the Jew into the
mart, and sunk his soul in barter. But this is not true—Commerce and
money-getting are the psychonomic features of both the Hebrew races. The
Israelitish branch is vehemently charged with its usury and extortion,
by all its prophets. The severe laws which Moses made against usury shew
the character of the people for whom they were necessary; yet those laws
were ineffectual to check this inherent vice. Ezekiel (ch. xxii. 12)
exclaims, “Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily
gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the
Lord God;” so all the prophets.

The Arab and the Jew are both now equally sunk in the same degradation,
(_Heu! quantum mutati!_) and both exhibit, through this degradation,
their love of gold, though in a different manner. The Arab still
haunting his native soil, from which legitimate commerce is almost
excluded, betrays his ruling passion in extortion from travellers, in
skilful chicanery in horse-dealing—the only commerce left to him—or in
impudent incessant demands on strangers for _bacsheesh_.

All travellers agree, that when the Arab, degraded as he is, has an
opportunity, there is no shrewder or more skilful bargain-maker, nor any
one more competent to extract by ingenious chaffering, the full
equivalent for his services. He has been designated by fleeced and angry
travellers—little thinking how near the mark they were—the Jew of the
desert. The modern Jew, driven from the land of his birth into a wider
sphere, exercises his commercial propensities in similar pursuits, and
under every clime; and amidst every race, out-manœuvres and surpasses
his less shrewd antagonist.

Other Asiatic nations might seem to call for observation; but so little
is known of their mental characteristics, that it would be improper to
endeavour to substantiate our cause by them.

It is unnecessary to do more than remind the reader of the low
development of the Negro mind and his miserable nasal conformation—they
are worthy of each other. However humane may be the attempts to elevate
the Negro, it can never be done till his Nose is more elongated; but as
its present form has subsisted without alteration for three or four
thousand years, there does not seem much hope of its being improved now.
The Negro race, as old as the earliest Egyptian sculptures, has never
risen to an equality with any of the other races; and, though we would
not willingly condemn any nation to hopeless degradation, yet the
history of the Past _will_ reveal somewhat of the secrets of the Future,
and he is a fool who cannot, and a coward who dare not, read them.

As among individuals, so among nations there are orders and degrees of
mind, and it is only the blind who cannot see that the equality of the
one is as wild a dream as the equality of the other.

No well-informed writer, however warm his sympathies towards the Negro
race as his relation by the same “blood of which God made all the
dwellers upon earth,” has anticipated a destiny for it equal to that of
the Caucasian or elliptical-headed and aquiline-nosed races. Channing,
the most enthusiastic friend of the blacks, in all the fervour of his
ardent mind and vivid imagination, attributes to them a capacity only
for the milder graces of Christianity, and accords to them a destiny
precisely such as is indicated by their nasal formation when elevated
and sanctified by religion. “I should expect,” he says, “from the
African race, if civilized, less energy, less courage, less intellectual
originality, than in ours; but more amiableness, tranquillity,
gentleness, and content. They might not rise to an equality in outward
condition, but would probably be a much happier race.” Essentially a
feminine character is that which he assigns the negro; a character very
loveable, notwithstanding the deformity of its facial indicator.

In the new Islands of the Pacific, we behold a constant succession of
new worlds emerging from the deep by means of the same process which, in
the pre-Adamite world, formed and elevated the islands and continents of
the northern hemisphere. Minute polypi are secreting from the waters,
and fixing on the summits of submarine volcanoes the solid and durable
limestone which now forms their protection from the waves, and which
will hereafter form the foundations on which accumulated detritus will
heap up fertile soils and habitable lands.[53] Earthquakes are
continually pushing up these horizontal surfaces, and breaking them up
into mountains which, arresting the clouds in their progress, draw down
into the valleys and plains the fertilizing rain. This smooths down the
asperities of the earthquake-broken surface, and softens and harmonizes
into that sweet variety which gives birth to

                “The pleasure situate in hill and dale.”

To people these new lands, Nature has branched off from the old stock,
new races of men of various degrees of physical development and mental
endowments. While those nearest the old continent of Asia, and therefore
nearest to the old blood, are of the lowest possible mental and physical
organization, little elevated above the low-class animals—the kangaroo
and the ornithorynchus[54]—of the Australian plains, those at a greater
distance—the New Zealander and the Otaheitan—exhibit a development which
may vie with that of the Caucasian nations: and which has proved its
equality by not sinking before them, but maintaining against Saxon
invaders equal rights and equal privileges.

We have a striking instance of this before us at the present time. The
British Legislature having, in ignorance of the determined character and
clever good sense of the New Zealanders, endeavoured to force upon them
a Constitution which deprived them of legislative privileges equal with
those of the colonists, and which gave to the latter the power of taxing
the former without their consent, the natives have resisted the
injustice so firmly, but hitherto peaceably, that the Governor, Sir
George Grey, has been compelled to suspend this so-called Constitution,
lest it should foment a war of the most deadly character. It is worthy
of observation that the injustice attempted to be done this shrewd and
spirited people, is not one of an evident physical character, such as
any savage can appreciate, but one of a purely theoretical and political
nature, the importance of which is even yet hardly sufficiently
understood and appreciated in any country besides England. Sir George
Grey writes to the Home Government as follows:

“By the introduction of the proposed Constitution into the provinces of
New Zealand, her Majesty’s Ministers would not confer, as it was
intended, upon her subjects the blessings of self-government, but would
be giving power to a small minority (the colonists). She would not be
giving to her subjects the right to manage their affairs as they might
think proper, but would be giving to a small _minority a power to raise
taxes from the great majority_ (the aborigines). There was no reason to
think that the majority of the aboriginal inhabitants would be satisfied
with the rule of the minority; while there are many reasons for
believing that they would resist to the uttermost. They were people of
_strong natural sense and ability_, but by nature jealous and
suspicious. Many of them were owners of vessels, horses, and cattle, and
had considerable sums of money at their disposal, _and there was no
people he was acquainted with less likely to sit down quietly under what
they might regard as an injustice_.”

“For these and other reasons, the Governor announced that he should not
proclaim the constitution before receiving fresh instructions from the
Colonial Office.

“The tone of the most trustworthy correspondence from New Zealand,
proves that this exercise of independent authority on the part of
Governor Grey has saved the colony from disastrous consequences.
Ministers acknowledge his superior competency to judge in a matter of
this kind, and a bill has accordingly been introduced into the House of
Commons by Mr. Labouchere, ‘for suspending, during a limited time (viz.,
for five years), the operation of part of the Act for making further
provision for the government of the New Zealand Islands.’”[55]

Thus has this noble people, with a strong natural sense and ability not
hitherto supposed to belong innately to “savages,” opposed more
successfully the first step in tyranny—the power of unrepresented
taxation—than any other nation (except the Saxon), which has ever
existed, civilized or uncivilized.

This has been done within twenty years after their actual beneficial
contact with civilization; but it was more than six hundred years after
the Norman conquest, before the Saxon roused himself to enforce the same
right of self-taxation. There could be but one better evidence than this
of the high-class mind of this people; and it has furnished this one
better, and best, evidence—its speedy and conscientious reception of
Christianity; for “in no country, similarly circumstanced, has the
Gospel made such rapid progress, since the days of the Apostles.”[56]

While for several centuries missionaries of every denomination have
laboured in Asia in vain, no sooner was Christianity efficiently made
known to the New Zealanders, than, catching at once with a remarkable
aptitude its leading characteristics, and appreciating immediately its
beneficent doctrines, they accepted it; and now, together with other
Polynesian islands, New Zealand affords the proudest conquest and the
richest harvest of the soldier of Christ.

Yet, apparently, for no nation could Christianity be less adapted, and
no nation could be expected to afford less hope of speedy conversion.
The pagan New Zealander was a fierce, blood-thirsty monster, spending
his whole life, and finding all his pleasures, in the most savage
warfare. Not content with slaying his enemies in combat, he sat down
afterwards, with a joyous enthusiasm worthy of a fiend, to make a feast
on their carcasses. Human sacrifices stained his altars, and hideously
deformed images pourtrayed his debased notions of a God.

On the other hand, the peaceable and mild Hindoos, whose religion
forbids bloody sacrifices of any kind, and enjoins the careful
preservation of the spirit of life, even in the meanest forms; whose
singular traditions of the incarnate Chreeshna seem to point distinctly
to a Messiah, and whose remarkable Trimurti, “three in one, and one in
three,” seems to open a way to the facile reception of the mysterious
doctrine of a Trinity in Unity, have never, as a nation, a province, or
even a small village, embraced Christianity.[57] China, which has its
similar traditions, whose sages have taught that “The true Holy One is
to be found in the West,” and that “Eternal reason (λόγος) produced One,
One produced Two, Two produced Three, and THREE produced all things,”
and whose calm stoicism and severe morality are so accordant with the
external symptoms of a Christian mind, has hardly furnished a single
convert, and apparently feels no curiosity about the religion of the
Fanqui (white devils).

If history is the past teaching lessons to the future, surely our
Missionary Societies might take a lesson from these facts, and withdraw
their exertions from so hopeless a field as Asia, and expend them on the
hopeful soil of Polynesia. Surely if the great Apostle of the Gentiles,
who was specially appointed to bring into the fold of Christ “all
nations,” was forbidden to preach the Word to the effete nations of
Asia, it is not given to his successors to contravene the inspired
mandate.

Other injunctions of Scripture to the apostolic Church are rightly
interpreted as applicable, and to be obeyed by the Church in all future
ages; and it is a strange inconsistency, arising from a too warm and
enthusiastic desire to promote the kingdom of Christ, fruitlessly to
strive, in this instance, against the mandate of the Holy Spirit.

Thus much have we said, to contrast the New Zealand mind with the Hindoo
and the Chinese, because the same contrast is manifest in their
respective physiognomies.

[Illustration:

  NEW ZEALANDER.
]

Compare the bold energetic Roman Nose, the manly and commanding profile
of the New Zealander, with the soft and rounded features of the Hindoo,
and the flat monotonous surface of the Chinese visage. You perceive at a
glance that the first is the face of a man of strong, straight-forward,
common sense, and intense energy. He may not be an acute and subtle
reasoner; but he catches at once the leading points of a subject,
instantly decides, and instantly acts upon his decision.

While the two latter remain in imperturbable absorption, and while the
subtle “Greek” would be thinking too precisely on the event,

         “A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom,
         And ever three parts coward,”

the “Roman” has been, and seen, and conquered. He is come back, at home,
resting after his successful toil; while the “Snub” is thinking about
getting out of bed, and the “Greek” is making up his mind whether it is
“worth while” to go out.


Thus we have, from divers sources, brought together, briefly and
succinctly, a few of the universal proofs which establish Nasology as a
science. From individuals and from nations we have gathered the basis of
our nasological laws; and we trust we have produced conviction in some
minds that “the Nose is an index to Character;” if not, we shall not say
to the reader, as phrenologists do to their incredulous auditors, that
it arises from his defective organization, but rather attribute it to
our own defective mode of argumentation; for we shall not willingly
admit the erroneousness of a system which has been built up upon many
years of personal observation both among the dead and among the living.


                                THE END.

-----

Footnote 1:

  It would be rather amusing, if it were not a melancholy sign of human
  perverseness, to sum up all the hypotheses which have been at their
  first promulgation pronounced impious and heretical. The denial of the
  approaching End of the World in any century after Christ; the
  Copernican System; Inoculation and Vaccination for the Small-pox; the
  change of the Style of the year; Pecuniary Usufruct; Geology;
  Phrenology; Railways; Aërostation; the Census; Mesmerism, &c. &c.,
  would be included in the list of either existing or defunct heresies.

Footnote 2:

  We shall endeavour to speak of Mind in popular phraseology, instead of
  in the obscure terms in which metaphysicians envelope their ignorance
  of mental phenomena.

Footnote 3:

  See Combe’s Phrenology; _passim_.

Footnote 4:

  See the woodcut (after a gem in the Florentine Museum) on the
  Title-page.

Footnote 5:

  The Platonic theory that beauty of form generally indicates beauty of
  mind, is finely condensed by Spenser into a single line:

               “All that is good is beautiful and fair.”

                                 A HYMN OF HEAVENLY BEAUTY.

  And again

             “All that fair is, is by nature good;
             That is a sign to know the gentle blood.”—IBID.

  Wordsworth would also appear to be a Platonist:

                 “For passions linked to forms so fair
                 And stately, needs must have their share
                 Of noble sentiment.”—RUTH.

Footnote 6:

  A Nose should never be judged of in profile only; but should be
  examined also in front to see whether it partakes of Class III.

Footnote 7:

  Thus Phrenologists rightly urge that negative qualities require no
  organ. Hate is only the absence of Benevolence; dislike to children, a
  defective Philoprogenitiveness.

Footnote 8:

  Hooke’s Rom. Hist. b. vi, c. i.

Footnote 9:

  We write thus reservedly, because there are some well-attested recent
  instances of cannibalism in Ireland. The following anecdote is
  likewise narrated by Leyden. “Reiterated complaints having been made
  to James I. of Scotland, of the cruelties of the Sheriff of Mearns,
  James exclaimed, ‘Sorra’ gin the Shirra’ were sodden, an’ supp’d in
  broo’.’ Thereupon four Lairds decoyed the Sheriff to the top of the
  hill of Garrock, and having prepared a fire and a boiling cauldron,
  they plunged the unlucky man into the latter. After he was _sodden_
  for a sufficient time, the savages fulfilled to the letter the King’s
  hasty exclamation by _supping the shirra’-broo_!” If the subject were
  more agreeable to dwell upon, it would be easy to furnish many other
  well-attested instances of the slaking of hunger and the thirst of
  revenge by a repast of human flesh.

Footnote 10:

  Pict. Hist. of England.

Footnote 11:

  The indications of I being so decidedly opposed to those of V and VI
  it seems almost impossible for them to be associated.

Footnote 12:

  The class placed first in these compounds is that which predominates.

Footnote 13:

  Gibbon.

Footnote 14:

  Roscoe’s Life of L. de’ Medici, chap. ix.

Footnote 15:

  See Hone’s description of one performed in 1815 before several crowned
  heads of Europe for three successive days; _Hone on the Mysteries_.
  See also _Wilhelm Meister_, vol. 1.

Footnote 16:

  In Germany about 1750, and in England about 1550, the vernacular first
  began to supersede the Latin in philosophical and literary works.

Footnote 17:

  Asser’s Life of Alfred.

Footnote 18:

  Life of Raleigh, 6 Port. Gal. p. 10.

Footnote 19:

  Colin Clout.

Footnote 20:

  If Napoleon was an imitator of Alexander, it was only another point of
  identity between them; for Alexander was an imitator of Bacchus.

Footnote 21:

  It is narrated of Napoleon that he was a practical Nasologist, and
  influenced in his choice of men by the size of their Noses. “Give me,”
  said he, “a man with a good allowance of Nose. Strange as it may
  appear, when I want any good headwork done, I choose a man—provided
  his education has been suitable—with a long Nose.”

Footnote 22:

  D’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation, B. I.

Footnote 23:

  The physiognomy of M. Ledru-Rollin, the Communist leader, is said, by
  an eye-witness, to be “without one redeeming quality—insolent,
  conceited, reckless, headstrong, cruel.”

Footnote 24:

  We trust no one will misunderstand these observations, but give us
  credit for making them sincerely and with all reverence; firmly
  convinced as we are, that if the system is true, it _must_, like all
  other sciences, furnish its quota of proofs of design in the universe.

Footnote 25:

  The use of this word would often save the quibble, whether a system is
  entitled to be called a science, or only a theory or hypothesis. Thus
  both the advocates and the opponents of phrenology or geology might
  agree to call them noögenisms. For this reason we apply the word here
  to geology, which some persons assert to be more than a mere
  hypothesis, while others deny its claim to be called a science. At
  present we claim for Nasology no higher title than that of a mental
  deduction from facts or noögenism.

Footnote 26:

  Longum, difficile est deponere amorem.

Footnote 27:

  Nov. Org., Sec. VII.

Footnote 28:

  How different is the language of the disciple from that of the master!
  Bacon himself says, “Read not to contradict nor to believe (_i. e._
  for facts), but to _weigh and consider_.”

Footnote 29:

  Explanations, 2nd Edit. p. 78.

Footnote 30:

  Nov. Organ.

Footnote 31:

  Ibid. Pt. 1, Sect. 7.

Footnote 32:

  Historical and Critical Essays, vol. ii. The reader who wishes to form
  an estimate of the sordid views of the utilitarian school, had better
  peruse the whole of Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon.

Footnote 33:

  Essays, vol. ii. p. 386–403.

Footnote 34:

  Filum Labyrinthi.

Footnote 35:

  New Atlantis.

Footnote 36:

  Lucretius. Rerum Natura. Bacon would seem to have had this passage
  again in his mind, when he described Plato as “a man of a sublime
  genius, _who took a view of everything as from a high rock_.”—_De
  Augmentis_, sec. 5.

Footnote 37:

  Essay on Truth.

Footnote 38:

  Filum Labyrinthi, Part 1.

Footnote 39:

  Earthly and heavenly are not here used in the New Testament sense, for
  sinful and holy, but in the Old Testament sense; earthly, for things
  pertaining to the body formed of the dust of the ground, and heavenly,
  for things pertaining to the mind, the breath of God.

Footnote 40:

  Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon, vol. ii., p. 426.

Footnote 41:

  _i. e._ Post Christum.

Footnote 42:

  This head enables us to point out a characteristic difference between
  the convexity of the Jewish Nose and the Roman. The convexity of the
  former commences at the eyes, and if it afterwards aquilines, the Nose
  is I⁄IV or IV⁄I according as I. or IV. prevails. The convexity of the
  Roman Nose is confined to the _centre_ of the Nose, and occasions its
  aquilineness.

Footnote 43:

  Ephes. v. 22–24.

Footnote 44:

  “In 1846, which was a year of larger emigration than any that
  preceded, it amounted to 129,851. But in the year 1847, the emigration
  extended to no less than 258,270 persons, almost the whole of them
  being Irish emigrants to North America. It is scarcely necessary to
  observe, that history records no single transportation at all to
  compare with this. The migrations of classical antiquity were only the
  slow oozings of infant tribes from one thinly-peopled district into
  another rather less peopled, or rather more fertile. In actual
  figures, the irruptions from the north into southern Europe were never
  at one time more immense.

  “The Government only refrained from assisting this tremendous
  emigration at the urgent demand of the land-owners, because it was
  going on as fast as possible without its aid. Bad legislation had
  driven the Celt to the ocean, and Saxon ingenuity had furnished him a
  boat to cross it. Famine and pestilence were at his heels. It was
  unnecessary to do more. What drowning wretch will not catch at a
  straw? What patient idiot not fly from misery and death? Yet how
  monstrous to call such flight—‘the _sauve qui peut_ of a
  panic-stricken army’ spontaneous!

  “It was the _unavoidable_ misfortune of this emigration to be
  _entirely spontaneous_. The cry was—‘_Sauve qui peut!_’ To send out
  more emigrants at the public expense, or to promise assistance to all
  who should emigrate, would only have been adding fuel to the fire, or
  like attempting to expedite the movement of a crowd locked in a narrow
  passage, by applying fresh numbers and pressure to its rear. A
  miserable necessity dictated that, as a general rule, emigration
  should be allowed to retain its spontaneous, unassisted
  character. * * * The fever, _it is a painful satisfaction to reflect_,
  raged with equal force in all the British vessels, whether well or
  ill-provisioned and appointed. Fearful, too, as the loss of life was,
  both at sea and on landing, _it was not greater than was reasonably to
  be expected_ from the mortality which prevailed, under circumstances
  rather less unfavourable for health, in the workhouses and other
  accumulations of Irish at home.”—_Times, Jan. 1848._

  History, in its blackest pages, records nothing more horrible than the
  miseries of the passage; yet while we are maudlin over the horrors of
  the slave-trade, we “reflect, with a painful satisfaction, and
  reasonably expect” the more dreadful sufferings of our
  fellow-citizens. The slave-dealer—before the Abolition made it
  necessary to stow three cargoes in one ship—calculated to land at
  their destination four-fifths of his cargo; and it was thought
  sufficiently shocking that 1 in 5 died on the passage. But the
  mortality on board the Irish emigrant-ships was greater. Many vessels,
  from their rotten state, perished altogether, with from 200 to 300
  passengers. This rarely happens with a slaver, as the vessels are
  necessarily of the very best construction. But, of those who escaped
  shipwreck, 1 in 3, and 1 in 4 died on the passage from fever, and one
  half the remainder suffered from disease. The “Laren” from Sligo
  sailed with 440 passengers—108 died and 150 were sick. The “Virginius”
  sailed with 496 passengers—158 died, 186 were sick, and the remainder
  landed feeble and tottering. It could hardly be otherwise, when
  vessels built to pack 200 emigrants sailed with twice that number; so
  that they are described to be worse than the blackhole of Calcutta.
  And this was the emigration which the British parliament—which
  laboured to put down the slave-trade—declared itself willing to
  encourage, had it been necessary, from any backwardness in the
  wretched Celts, to avail themselves of it, and which a British
  Minister coolly declared it would have been inhuman and unjust to
  interfere with.

Footnote 45:

  “Territa quæsitis ostendit terga Britannis.”—LUCAN.

Footnote 46:

  Edinburgh Review, No. 178, p. 443, Oct. 1848.

Footnote 47:

  Schnitzler’s ‘Russia under Alexander and Nicholas.’

Footnote 48:

  Humboldt’s Cosmos, p. 411.

Footnote 49:

  Acts, ch. xvi.

Footnote 50:

  That is, westerly from the country last civilized or Christianized.

Footnote 51:

  The repugnance of Christian commentators to allow any good in
  Mahometanism, has caused them to apply the promises of national glory
  made to Ishmael, to the petty chieftainship and desert supremacy of
  the Arab tribes during the centuries antecedent to Christ, though it
  is obvious that they were not then more powerful as “a nation” than
  they are now, and that to no period of their history but to that of
  the Saracenic Caliphates can the fulfilment be justly accorded.

Footnote 52:

  The Hebrews consider themselves to be so named from Heber, an ancestor
  of Abraham (Gen. xi. 15). The descendants of Ishmael are therefore
  equally entitled to the name.

Footnote 53:

  “The prodigious extent of the combined and unintermitting labours of
  these little world-architects must be witnessed in order to be
  adequately conceived or realized. They have built up 400 miles of
  barrier-reef on the shores of Caledonia; and on the north-east coast
  of Australia their labours extend for 1000 miles in length; averaging
  a quarter of a mile in breadth, and one hundred and fifty feet in
  depth. The geologist, in contemplating these stupendous operations,
  learns to appreciate the circumstances by which were deposited, in
  ancient times, those mountain-masses of limestone, for the most part
  coralline, which abound in many parts of our native island.”—_Ansted’s
  Ancient World_, p. 32.

Footnote 54:

  Zoologists class the Marsupiala as the very lowest form of Mammalia,
  and but little removed above the cold-blooded Reptilia. They are a
  connecting link between those two great classes of Vertebrata. The
  Ornithorynchus is an animal of still lower organization. The whole
  fauna and flora of Australia indicate a newly-formed land, and are
  analogous to those of the Poilitic and New Red Sandstone ages of the
  Northern Hemisphere; which in like manner succeeded Coralline
  Limestones, and in which small islands began to be united into large
  islands and quasi-continents.

Footnote 55:

  Leeds Mercury, Jan. 1848.

Footnote 56:

  Church Missionary Report, 1848.

Footnote 57:

  INDIA.—England holds in subjection _one hundred millions of heathens
  and idolaters_. India is at once our glory and our shame. Though we
  have been masters there for nearly a century, little has yet been done
  towards the Christianizing of that mighty empire.—_Appeal of the
  Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, 1848.




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                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 ● P. 7, changed “This a drawback which we feel greatly” to “This is a
     drawback which we feel greatly”.
 ● P. 73, changed “they turn their tales round” to “they turn their
     tails round”.
 ● P. 149, changed “lest in should foment a war” to “lest it should
     foment a war”.
 ● Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 ● Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
 ● Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the
     end of the last chapter.
 ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.