Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“ When I was last at * * a nun made her escape from the Irish nunnery. The first thing for which she enquired, when she reached the house in which she was to be secreted till she could be conveyed on board ship, was a looking glass. She had entered the convent when only five years old, and from that time had never seen her own face. This was not vanity. A man in the same situation might have been allowed to interpret γνωθι σεαυτον in the same manner.
The Hindoo women wear a small mirror in a ring,—the Chury, Sir William Jones calls it. We have them in pocket books ”