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.
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.
