uate his sentences with it; that just at the end of a long parenthesis he turned up his nose, which served to note the change of subject as well as, or better than, a printed mark. Few noses have been a more fruitful theme of wit. There was no satirist of his Lordship who did not make it a point to gird at his proboscis. A million of conceits have hung from it as from a peg. For years it was the target of Punch's jokes, till it became almost a part of his stock in trade:

A thousand scapes of wit

Made it the father of their idle dream,
And racked it with their fancies.

Such a nose, though a godsend to the wags of the press, must be the despair of painters. Yet, with all its lines, "centric and eccentric," it is not more puzzling than have been others of less equivocal beauty. When in 1784 Gainsborough painted Mrs. Siddons, then in the prime of her glorious beauty and in the full blaze of her popularity, he found great difficulty in delineating the nose; and, after repeatedly altering its shape, he exclaimed, "Confound the nose! there is no end to it."

Persons unskilled in physiognomy cannot understand how the nose can be significant of character. To talk of an organ so unchangeable as being expressive, seems to them absurd. In opposition to this, Dugazon, a French actor distinguished in the period immediately preceding Talma, used to maintain that the nose is the most complete organ of expression, and that there are forty distinct modes of moving this single feature with variety of effect. Many a cool, calculating hypocrite, who has gained a complete mastery over the expression of his thoughts and feelings by his other facial features, has been betrayed by a refractory nose. Bal

zac, in his Théorie de la Démarche, tells of a cunning. dissembler, who had schooled his countenance into a wonderful immobility,-eye, cheek, and lip becoming at his bidding absolutely devoid of meaning,—and who had reduced his voice to an imperturbable evenness of tone, yet could not subdue the end of his nose. Que voulez-vous?" he adds: "le Vice n'est pas parfait."

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While it is just to speak of some noses as eccentric and provocative of laughter, it must not be forgotten. that all beauty is relative. Though in Europe and America the Grecian nose is accepted as the highest type, yet the Kalmucks prefer a dumpy club nose, the Hottentots a flat one, and the Chinese a short, thick one. The wife of the celebrated Jenghiz Khan, the Tartar, was deemed irresistible because she had only two holes for a nose. Artists, however, contend that a nose, to be well formed, should be one-third of the length of the face, from the tip of the chin to the roots of the hair. It should also be straight,- with the nostrils small and fine, springing well from the face, and meeting in that delicate bracket which seems lightly to sustain the weight of both nose and forehead, yet also open and instinct with life, for the breath of man resides in them. Even the most hideous nasal enormity, however, provided it be a bona fide flesh-and-blood nose, is preferable to an artificial nose,-a bogus frontispiece, a mere nasal hypocrisy, however beautiful. is a remark of Lessing that "every man has his own style, like his own nose;" commenting on which, Carlyle adds, that no nose can be justly amputated by the public, if only it be a real nose, and no wooden one. put on for mere show and deception.

It

It is a profound remark of the Roman poet, Martial, that not every man is so lucky as to have a nose.

The observation is more applicable to his own country than to ours, for it may be questioned whether in a climate like ours, made up chiefly of highly concentrated and biting Northeasters, and where flowers are so scentless and transitory, noses are not sometimes an inconvenience as well as a blessing. We have six bleak months in our solar year, in which the sensation produced by cold upon the nose is as though a rat were hanging from the tip of it by his teeth.

We conclude our nasological observations with a sonnet by Horace Smith, the banker-poet, who is evidently "up to snuff," and speaks what he knows:

O nose! thou rudder in my face's centre,
Since I must follow thee until I die;
Since we are bound together by indenture,-
The master thou, and the apprentice I:
Oh! be to your Telemachus a mentor,

Though oft invisible, forever nigh:

Guard him from all disgrace and misadventure,
From hostile tweak, or Love's blind mastery.
So shalt thou quit the city's stench and smoke
For hawthorn lanes and copses of young oak,

Scenting the gales of heaven that have not yet
Lost their fresh fragrance since the morning broke,
And breath of flowers with rosy May-dews wet,
The primrose-cowslip - bluebell — violet.

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO.*

Singulière campagne, où j'ai vu trois fois s'échapper de nos mains le triomphe de la France! - NAPOLEON.

OF

F the sixteen or seventeen decisive battles of the world, there is no one of deeper interest, if there is one of greater importance, than the battle of Waterloo. Fought by the greatest Generals of the world, at the very prime of their reputation, and being, as it were, the crown and finish, not only of a splendid piece of strategy, but of the experience of twenty years' war, this duel, which closed the wars of the French Revolution, is one which will always be invested with a peculiar fascination for the reader, whether viewed in itself only, or in connection with the vast results that hung on its issue. Never was a victory more complete than that of the allied armies. It was not only a defeat of the French army and its chief; it was an extermination. It was a shipwreck of a people. On the 18th of June, 1815, between sunrise and sunset, the French empire breathed its last breath; at eight o'clock in the morning it stood erect, with all its hopes, at nine o'clock in the evening it was only a name and a recollection.

Why was this? How happened it that the hero of Austerlitz, and Jena, and Wagram, whose genius had never shone forth more resplendently than while fighting against fearful odds in the last campaign before

See the map at the end of this essay.

his banishment to Elba, was now, after a hundred victories, foiled? Was it because, as is popularly supposed, Marshal Grouchy was treacherous, and failed to intercept the Prussians, and because of the heavy rains which delayed Napoleon's attack till nearly noon,-or was it because of the superior energy, strategy, and, above all, promptness of his foes, that he was so overwhelmingly defeated? These questions we purpose to answer; and if we succeed in disabusing any reader of the notion that the Emperor was beaten through no fault of his own, simply because "the stars fought against him in their courses," and that he never showed more consummate generalship than on the fatal day when he left the field of Waterloo for exile, premature decay, and a grave amidst "the immensity of the seas," we shall deem our labor well expended.

The truth is, Napoleon owed his defeat to himself alone, to a series of blunders and delays which he would have denounced as unpardonable in another chief. Probably no one of his campaigns was more sagaciously planned. The brilliancy and justness of his conception. are admitted by every authority except Wellington, nay, even by critics who utterly condemn his execution, and who charge the failure to his inexplicable mismanagement. His first great error was in beginning the campaign with such an inferiority in numbers. The troops of Wellington and Blucher numbered about 226,000 men, with 496 guns. Napoleon's army amounted to 124,000 combatants, mostly veterans, with 344 guns, and under tried commanders. Of this force, 22,000 were cavalry, and 10,000 artillery. Compact in organization, homogeneous in composition, speaking one tongue, moving by the volition of a single will, devoted to its chief, and inspired "not merely with enthusiasm, but