"This is all very well when one is an Eastern despot and can pay compliments in freedom."

After writing recently in this column some remarks about the nose never figuring in amorous poetry, I ought to have been prepared to be triumphantly contradicted; for those generalisations are never exactly true, especially when they take the form of a universal negative. One correspondant wrote me a very charming letter drawing my attention to a case which I certainly ought to have remembered- that of the lady whose nose was "tip-tilted like the petal of a flower." This is very delicately done; I doubt if it could be done again. In any case, a careful selection among flowers must be made by the young lyrist who wishes to compare his lady's nose to any of them. Tiger-lilies, carnations, sunflowers, and such instances should be avoided. Another obliging gentleman sent me a postcard with the following quotation from the Song of Solomon- "Thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus." This is all very well when one is an Eastern despot and can pay compliments in freedom. But if in these days I endeavoured to ingratiate myself with a lady by comparing her nose to the Eiffel Tower it is not quite so easy to say what would happen.

-December 9, 1905, Illustrated London News, "Public Houses; Christianity and Christian Science; Noses and Compliments"