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FAMOUS NOSES.

By Captain Kenneth Lyon

"If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter,” observes Pascal in one of his Pensees, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” On Caesar’s death the cold and calculating Octavian and Antony,

Given to sport, to wildness, and much company,

had practically divided the Roman world between them; Octavian took the West and Antony the East, upon whose threshold he met the fatal and fascinating Cleopatra. From her thrall he never escaped. She made him dream of founding an Eastern Empire; Alexandria should riyal Rome; with Cleopatra for his empress he would found a dynasty; he legitimised the children she bore him and by a will endowed them with whole kingdoms that belonged to Rome; he collected an army of 100,000 Asiatics, and by celebrating at Alexandria a triumph ” he mocked and usurped for a provincial town the prerogative of the Imperial Capital. If Cleopatra had possessed a snub nose like Socrates, Antony might never have fallen in love with her; he might have remained a faithful husband and colleague and with Octavian restored the ancient glory of the Roman Republic, and Gibbon would never have had to write “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

A love story even more momentous hangs about the shapely features of Arietta. Had this daughter of an eleventh century tanner at Falaise possessed an ugly nose and thick ankles, Duke Robert of Normandy would never have fallen in love with her as she bathed her- pretty feet in the river; William the Conqueror would not have been born; England would have been spared the Norman invasion; and there would have been no British Empire.

Stranger still is the reflection that Henry VIII’s unhallowed delight in the pretty profile of Anne Boleyn, silhouetted against the sunshine on the terrace of Hever Castle, Actually proved a blow for the Reformation and the occasion of the emancipation of England from the spiritual domination of Rome. And men’s noses as well as women’s have played their part in history: It was Napoleon who said that when he wanted good headwork he always chose a man, if otherwise suitable, with a long nose.

His belief coincided with that of the British Army, for upon the eve of the battle of Fuentes Onoro Captain Kincaid, of the Rifle Brigade, records in his diary the absence of the Duke of Wellington .on a visit to Marshal Beresford before Badajos, adding: “and we would rather see his long nose in the fight than a reinforcement of ten thousand wen,”

But noses make for romance and laughter as well as history. Falstaff’s last recorded joke is about one: —

’A saw a flea stick upon Bardolph's nose, and 'a said it was a black soul burning in hell.

It was his own turn next, for when the landlady of the Boar’s Head, in Eastcheap, watched that “ greasy knight ” dying there she. noticed that

his nose was as sharp as a pen and 'a babbled of green fields.

Two other valiant knights possessed characteristic noses. Without his hooked nose Don Quixote is'as unimaginable as Punch without his, and Cyrano de Bergerac, when a young blood taunts him that his nose “is . h’m ... is verv big,” angrily exclaims, “Is that all'? ” “ All ? ” '“ You might have said at least a hundred things; like this . . . ‘Sir, if I had such a nose, I’d amputate it . . • no wind, O majestic nose, can give thee cold, save when the mistral blows. . . . When it bleeds, what a Red Sea! . . . marry, come up, ’tis a dwarf pumpkin,’ ” and so on in about the longest speech Cyrano makes in the play. Noses, too, can be the playground of romance. Queen Mab herself, the fairies’ midwife, comes:— In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an aiderman. Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses when they lie asleep. Then everyone dreams of his desires. A nose, too, as the vehicle of one of the senses, “ has its spiritual mysteries to reveal.” * * ¥ Dorian Gray was not entirely fantastic when he sought to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, wondering what it was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and* in champak that stained the imagination.

Dorian Gray only expressed in his precious manner what John Bunyan meant by that grim episode in the “ Holy War ” when Diabolus arrays Captain Sepulchre, Captain Brimstone, and Mr Corruption with their ironcoated battalions of “ Glory-doubters ” to assault the silver-armoured champions of Immanuel at the Nose Gate of the City of Mansoul.—An exchange.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/OW19301014.2.267.4

Bibliographic details

Otago Witness, Issue 3996, 14 October 1930, Page 68

Word Count
783

FAMOUS NOSES. Otago Witness, Issue 3996, 14 October 1930, Page 68

FAMOUS NOSES. Otago Witness, Issue 3996, 14 October 1930, Page 68

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