[ 282 ] [MARCH, 



THE DOUR NATIONS. 



" Quatuor homines quatuo- char tec 



The nations arc an Atlas: every man 



Hears in his face the outlines of' a map. 



Here, in the soil bland visage, you may trace. 



The fertile meadow and tbe fattening stream, 



Which drawls its oozy course ; there, in perk'd bone?, 



And sharpened nasal prominence, you ken 



The man o'the mountains ; while there, puckered features, 



Pursed up as each were forging of an oath, 



Proclaim the bullying trooper of the bog ; 



An-! that, hard front, flattened at top and square. 



Has Snowdon or Plinlymmon plain upon it. 



Head laces, and you are a shrewd geographer ; 



See countries, and you instantly shall know 



The gauge of their inhabitants. 



GODOLPHI 



IN the whole range of physiological science, there is not a truth more 

 demonstrated by every day's experience, in every country and in every 

 county, than that " man is formed out of the dust of the earth." Nor 

 does this apply only to the external form ; for the qualities of the clay, 

 either directly, or by being its organs, stamp upon the mind their own 

 characteristics ; and, if you have attended closely to this curious science, 

 you shall be enabled, from the knowledge of a man, to tell directly in 

 what kind of locality he was born ; and indirectly, if you are well 

 acquainted with any locality, you shall be enabled at once to estimate the 

 general character of its inhabitants. A certain portion of this philosophy 

 is intuitive in every human heart ; and, perhaps, that is the reason why 

 it has never been formally admitted into the circle of the sciences. But 

 this want of respect for it in the schools, how much soever it may make 

 against the acumen and good sense of those who have legislated there, 

 detracts nothing either from the curiosity or the utility of the study. 



No where are there finer opportunities of practising one branch of this 

 philosophy, and of profiting by the practice, than in the British metro- 

 polis in the various associations and circles of whose inhabitants the 

 ends of the earth are brought together, and every variety of human cha- 

 racter made to pass before you in a single day. Go to the haunts of 

 business, the halls of feasting, the saloons of gaiety, or the dens of vice ; 

 and, whether at one or at another, the map of the world is still spread 

 full before you not only in its continents and its empires, but'in its small 

 islands and smaller provinces. 



Upon the general geography, I shall not enter in the mean time ; but 

 shall confine myself to those provinces which are the most easily studied, 

 and which it is of the greatest practical use to know the Four Nations 

 that make up the British Public. In whatever place you meet them 

 whatever be their occupation, their relative talents, or their relative 

 virtues, there is not the smallest danger of your confounding the one with 

 the other. Your Englishman stands with his feet as firmly planted, as 

 though the earth felt upon its surface nothing valuable or weighty, but 

 that body of which they form the base : his facial line deviates not from 

 the perpendicular by the twentieth part of a degree ; and you are instantly 

 impressed with the idea, that here is a being who counts himself superior 

 to every being around, and who must stand or fall openly and in the 

 light, and would be unworthy of himself were he to resort to any thing 



