Brushes may be defined to be instruments formed of fibres set more or less parallel to each other. The vast variety of brushes used in different parts of Europe is indicative of the civilisation of the nations who use them. Take, for example, the brushes used in household management, such as the hearth-brush, the housemaid’s brush, the Turk’s-head brush, the crumb-brush, the stair-brush, the carpet-brush, the dusting brush, and many others.
Then we have those which are applied to our garments, such as the ordinary clothes-brush, the velvet-backed hat-brush, and the three kinds of boot-brushes.
In architecture, again, we should be very badly off without the painting-brushes, the whitewasher’s brush, and the paper-hanger’s brush; not to mention the exceeding variety of brushes used by artists both in oil and water colours.
As to brushes applied to our persons, we have an infinite number of them. There is, of course, the hair-brush, without a pair of which, one for each hand, no one with a respectable head of hair could be expected to be happy.
We may add to this the revolving brush worked by machinery, which is to be found in the rooms of any respectable hairdresser, and which is a sort of an apotheosis of the Hair-brush, especially when it is worked, as in some places, by the electrical engine.
Then there is the shaving-brush, once an absolutely necessary article in a gentleman’s dressing-case, and above all requisite if the owner should happen to be a clergyman. Nowadays, shaving is rapidly decreasing, and of all the professions, those who are most largely bearded, both in number of beard-wearers and dimensions of the beard, are to be found among the clergy.
Then there are any number of tooth-brushes for the interior of the mouth, and of flesh-brushes, with or without handles, for the service of the bath. There are even gardeners’ brushes, for the purpose of clearing the plants of the aphides, or green-blight, as these insects are popularly called by gardeners. So it will be seen that—absurd as the proposition may appear at first sight—we may really accept the use of the brush as a safe test of the progress of civilisation.
We will now glance at the illustrations of this subject.
On the right hand is depicted the once honoured Shaving-brush, the terror of all stiff-bearded men on frosty mornings, and yet clung to with a strange inconsistency. Many years ago a military member of the House of Commons was sensible enough to wear his beard, and was, in consequence, the butt for interminable jokes. At the present time, if the House were counted, a great majority of the younger, and not a few of the older, members will be found to wear either the beard or moustache, or both.
