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.