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?’