[41]. There is something in the operation of shaving which, besides its painfulness, ought to make it repulsive to those who do not shave themselves—such as having the face bedaubed with lather and rubbed with a brush, which has done the same office for hundreds of chins. It is amusing to hear a knot of free and independent Englishmen roaring “Britons never will be slaves;” most of whom will give their chins to be mown and their noses to be pulled by any common Barber, and pay him too for the pulling. Even when the party is a self-shaver, to say nothing of the waste of time, what a number of petty annoyances and exercises of temper does it involve! Notwithstanding the boasts of cold water shavers, depend upon it in rigorous weather most people prefer hot to cold water, which renders them slaves to their servants; next, razors, as we know from puff advertisements and our own experience, are the most uncertain of articles; then there is the state of the nerves, that even the strongest cannot always control, causing the unsteady hand to gash and hack the chin, or cover it with blood from the beheading of those pimply eruptions of which the razor has been ofttimes the originator.

[42]. Old Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy adds his quaint testimony. “No sooner doth a young man see his sweetheart coming, than he smugs up himself, pulls up his cloak, ties his garter points, sets his band and cuffs, sticks his hair, twires his Beard,” &c.

D’Israeli also says, “when the fair sex were accustomed to behold their lovers with Beards, the sight of a shaved chin excited feelings of horror and aversion; as much indeed as in this less heroic age would a gallant whose luxuriant Beard should ‘Stream like a meteor to the troubled air.’”

[43]. The whole dialogue from whence this phrase is taken, is suggestive of the contempt with which the ladies of Elizabeth and James the 1st’s time regarded a hairless chin. And there are numerous passages in our old Dramatists which might be quoted to the same effect, but that some of the allusions do not square with modern notions of delicacy.

[44]. It is scarcely conceivable what strange remarks have been made to me on the subject of the Beard. One party very gravely enquired whether I really thought that Adam had a Beard? Another was remonstrating with me on the first manifestations of my moustache; against whom I wickedly urged the argumentum ad feminam—you don’t object to it in the military? when the daughter naively chimed in, “why you know, Sir, it is natural to them!” Two or three acute persons, one of them a lawyer, have objected, “but you have your hair cut!” To which I have replied, “yes! but I don’t shave it off; and I trim my Beard instead of removing it. You also pare your nails; but you don’t think of plucking them out, do you?”