Even when a nasal peculiarity is due to an accident of its environment it confers no inconsiderable distinction, apart from its possessor’s other and perhaps superior claims to renown, as in the instances of Michael Angelo, Tycho Brahe and the beloved Thackeray, in whose altered frontispiece we are all the more interested because of his habit of dipping it in the Gascon wine. The spreading nose of Socrates was no doubt a source of great regret to him, whether its faults and failings were of Xanthippe’s making or, as Zopyrus had the incivility to inform him, inherited from drunken, thieving and lascivious ancestors; yet who would willingly forego the emotions and sentiments inspired by that unusual nose? It seems a precious part of his philosophy. The connection between the poetic eminence of Ovid and the noses from which his family, the Nasones, derived its name is doubtless more than accidental, and to our knowledge of his hereditary nasal equipment, albeit we know not the precise nature of the endowment, must be ascribed a part of our interest in his work. He to whom the secret of metamorphosis was an open book is not affirmed to have made any attempt to alter the family feature, as he doubtless would have done had he not recognized its essential relation to his genius. Plutarch declares that Cicero owed his surname to the fact that his nose had the shape of a vetch—_cicer_. Anyhow, his nose was as remarkable as his eloquence, in its different way. Gibbon and the late Prince Gortschakoff had noses uncommonly minute for men of commanding ability, which may have been a good thing for them, compelling them to rely upon their own endeavors to make their mark in the world. He who cannot climb to eminence upon his own nose will naturally seek another footing. Addison had a smooth Grecian nose, significantly suggestive of his literary style. Tennyson’s nose was long; so are some of his sermons in verse. Julius Cæsar, too, was gifted with a long nose, which a writer in a recent review has aptly called “enterprising.” That Cæsar was an enterprising man some of his contemporaries could feelingly have attested. The nose of Dante—ah, there was a nose! What words could do it justice? It is one of history’s most priceless possessions. One hesitates to say what powers and potencies lay latent in that superb organ; one can only regret that he did not give more time to the cultivation of its magnificent possibilities and less to evening up matters between himself and his enemies when peopling Hell as he had the happiness to conceive it.