“Apollo. One whose hair is loose and flowing;
Unfrizzled, unanointed, and untied;
No powder seen.——
“His royal highness prince William of Gloucester was an Apollo during the whole of his residence at the university of Cambridge! The strange fluctuation of fashions has often afforded a theme for amusing disquisition. ‘I can remember,’ says the pious archbishop Tillotson, in one of his sermons, discoursing on this head, viz. of hair! ‘since the wearing the hair below the ears was looked upon as a sin of the first magnitude; and when ministers generally, whatever their text was, did either find, or make occasion to reprove the great sin of long hair; and if they saw any one in the congregation guilty in that kind, they would point him out particularly, and let fly at him with great zeal.’ And we can remember since, the wearing the hair cropt, i. e. above the ears, was looked upon, though not as a ‘sin,’ yet as a very vulgar and raffish sort of a thing; and when the doers of newspapers exhausted all their wit in endeavouring to rally the new-raised corps of crops, regardless of the noble duke who headed them; and, when the rude, rank-scented rabble, if they saw any one in the streets, whether time, or the tonsor, had thinned his flowing hair, would point him out particularly, and ‘let fly at him,’ as the archbishop says, till not a shaft of ridicule remained! The tax upon hair powder has now, however, produced all over the country very plentiful crops. Among the Curiosa Cantabrigiensia, it may be recorded, that our ‘most religious and gracious king,’ as he was called in the liturgy, Charles the Second, who, as his worthy friend, the earl of Rochester, remarked,
‘never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one,’—
sent a letter to the university of Cambridge, forbidding the members to wear perriwigs, smoke tobacco, and read their sermons! It is needless to remark, that tobacco has not yet made its exit in fumo, and that perriwigs still continue to adorn ‘the heads of houses!’—Till the present all prevailing, all accommodating fashion of crops became general at the university, no young man presumed to dine in hall till he had previously received a handsome trimming from the hair-dresser. An inimitable imitation of ‘The Bard’ of Gray, is ascribed to the pen of the honourable Thomas (the late lord) Erskine, when a student at Cambridge. Mr. E. having been disappointed of the attendance of his college barber, was compelled to forego his commons in hall! An odd thought came into his head. In revenge, he determined to give his hair-dresser a good dressing; so he sat down, and began as follows:—
“‘Ruin seize thee, scoundrel Coe,
Confusion on thy frizzing wait;
Hadst thou the only comb below,
Thou never more shouldst touch my pate.
“‘Club, nor queue, nor twisted tail,
Nor e’en thy chatt’ring, barber, shall avail
To save thy horse-whipped back from daily fears
From Cantab’s curse, from Cantab’s tears.’”
The editor of the “Gradus ad Cantabrigiam” regrets that he has not room for the whole of the ode.
An Ancient Barber.
There is a curious print from Heemskerck, of a barber of old times labouring in his vocation: it shows his room or shop. An old woman is making square pancakes at the fire-place, before which an overfed man sits on a chair sleeping: there is a fat toping friar seated by the chimney corner, with his fingers on the crossed hands of a demure looking nun by his side, and he holds up a liquor-measure to denote its emptiness: a nun-like female behind, blows a pair of bellows over her shoulder, and seems dancing to a tune played on the guitar or cittern, by a humorous looking fellow who is standing up: another nun-like female sounds a gridiron with a pair of tongs, while another friar blows an instrument through a window. These persons are perhaps sojourning there as pilgrims, for there is a print hung against the wall representing an owl in a pilgrim’s habit on his journey. In this room the barber’s bleeding basin is hung up, and his razor is on the mantel ledge: the barber himself is washing the chin of an aged fool, whom, from the hair lying on the ground, it appears he has just polled. A dog on his hind legs is in a fool’s habit, probably to intimate that the fool is under the hands of the barber preparatory to his fraternizing with the friars and their dames. The print is altogether exceedingly humorous, and illustrative of manners: so much of it as immediately concerns the barber is given in the present [engraving] from it.