Turn we now to Jonathan Hookey, the barber. In person he differed much from Merton. His height did not exceed five feet, but, he made amends for it in breadth; for he was a man of a lusty habit, and sported a paunch which no London alderman or burgomaster of Amsterdam would look upon with contempt. Bald was his head, and his nose was not merely large but immense; but it is idle to grow eloquent upon noses. Has not Sterne exhausted the theme? have not we ourselves more than once expatiated upon it? Swakenbergius had a nose, so had Ovidius Naso; but to neither would Jonathan Hookey's strike its colours, and good crimson ones they were.
Jonathan, despite his bald head, his diminutive stature, his ample pot-belly, and ampler nose, was a man of fine feelings. Nature was outraged when he became a barber. He most assuredly was never destined by her to shave beards, and manufacture perukes for heads more brainless, many of them, than his own blocks. He ought to have been a professor of metaphysics or logic in some famous university, such as Heidelburg, Gottingen, or Glasgow;—but why lament over cureless evils? it is sufficient to say he is a barber, and there is an end of the matter.
We must now return to Merton. His solitary walks on the opposite side of the street had not even, from the first, escaped the scrutinizing eyes of Mr. Hookey. No: he saw in the tall, pale, elegant, dark-haired student the victim of deep sensibility. From seeing him, he wondered, from wondering he loved him, from loving he adored him: he knew at once he was no common man. Having perused Byron's Manfred, he conceived him to be such another as that strange character; or he might be a second Lara; or, more, he might be, nay he was, a glorious genius, full of high imaginings. Little do we know what bright thoughts passed through the mind of the enthusiastic Hookey. He cursed his profession, which debarred him from the fellowship of such a man: he cursed his nose, which stood between him and the object of his adoration.
Day after day had Mr. Hookey noticed the accomplished, the highly-gifted Merton; but it was only upon this particular morning that the recognition was mutual. Merton, on turning his eyes by chance from the ground, looked to the opposite side of the street, and there beheld a nose. He then turned his eyes to the earth in his usual meditative mood; but, reflecting that a nose without an owner was rather a singular phenomenon, he looked a second time, and there, behind the nose, he saw a man; it was Mr. Hookey himself.
This was the first time that the melancholy and intellectual student reciprocated upon Hookey the attention which Hookey had hitherto bestowed exclusively upon him. No more was the barber's "sweetness wasted upon the desert air," but fell on one who knew how to appreciate it to its fullest extent. Merton stood stock-still, and gazed upon him with mute admiration. He was positively fascinated. The nose operated upon him like the head of Medusa, and almost turned him to stone. And Mr. Hookey was fascinated too. Merton also had become Medusafied, and exercised a petrifactive influence upon the barber. He was nailed fast to the threshold of his own door, and gazed upon his fancied personification of Lara and Manfred with an indomitable and resistless perseverance, which utterly confounded himself; while Merton, nailed alike fast to the opposite footpath, stood staring at his antagonist, or rather at his nasal protuberance. This impressive scene continued for several minutes, when Merton, regaining the power of locomotion, slowly approached the barber, his arms all the while crossed, and his eyes intently fixed upon the nose. Nine slow and awful steps brought him face to face with Hookey. The barber's eyes were fixed intently upon his—his eyes upon the barber's nose. The scene was extremely dreadful; and Mr. Hookey, after vainly trying to keep his ground, retreated into the shop, still facing Merton, who kept advancing upon him as he receded. Back, step by step, went Hookey; forward, step by step, came Merton; each all the while eyeing the other with equal astonishment. The barber continued retreating, the other following him,—first through the shop, then through the kitchen, then through the parlour—the three apartments leading into one another. At last he got to the remotest corner of the parlour, and could get no farther. Here he paused, and Merton paused also. Still they gazed on each other,—the barber in the corner overpowered with amazement, and the student standing before him hardly less surprised. At last Merton broke silence in the following awful words,—"GRACIOUS HEAVENS WHAT A NOSE!" So saying, he retreated as slowly as he entered, leaving Mr. Hookey utterly stupified and bewildered. The sentence went like iron into the barber's soul; he felt it in all its bitterness.
It is almost unnecessary to say what an effect this scene had upon the highly-susceptible temperament of Merton. From that moment peace fled his mind. He went instantly home; but instead of devoting himself, as before, to those studies in which he delighted, and in which he was wont so highly to excel, he immured himself in his chamber, giving way to gloomy abstraction, and agonizing his spirit with painful and most distressing fancies. The great power of his imagination caused him, in a peculiar manner, to suffer from the remembrance of what he had witnessed; and, accordingly, his waking as well as his sleeping hours were haunted with visions of noses,—noses of stupendous size, which arose, like ocean islands, amid the gloomy tabernacle of his brain, and filled him with utter despair. At last, from bad to worse, he became the mere shadow of his former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint Luke's Hospital for the insane.
The fate of the barber was equally deplorable. The awful words pronounced by Merton may be considered his death-knell. They rang ever after in his ears; and, in a few weeks, his head was turned, his shop shut up, and himself sent to Bedlam. "Gracious heavens, what a nose!" This dreadful sentence—more dreadful than the hand-writing on the wall to Belshazzar,—haunted him by day and by night. Reason was dethroned, and "moody madness, laughing wild," was the result. Such are the frightful consequences of extreme susceptibility, against which the youth of both sexes ought to be constantly on their guard.
The worst remains to be told. These unhappy men were liberated from confinement about the same time, and both returned to Oxford. They seemed to have recovered their reasoning faculties, but the result showed that this was very far from being the case; for, happening to meet on the banks of the Cherwell, they attacked each other with such fury, that, like Brutus and Aruns, they were both killed on the spot,—the barber having been burked in the encounter, and the student having died of a wound which he received in the throat by his antagonist's razor.—Fraser's Magazine.