BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS.

"Now of beards there be

Such a company,

Of fashions such a throng,

That it is very hard

To treat of the beard,

Though it be ne'er so long."

Ballad in LE PRINCE D'AMOUR. (1650.)

WHOEVER invented wigs, proud as he may be of the achievement, cannot boast of the same antiquity for his fashion as that which attaches to the beard. The beard, like sewing, came in with or was a consequence of sin. With respect to sewing and sin, I have before spoken; and I will only add here, that in the most prosperous times of Puritanism, it was the fashion for Puritan ladies to wear aprons only of a green colour, that being presumedly the colour of the apron worn by Eve, whose daughters they were, and the remembrance of whose sin and the acknowledgment of their own, they perpetuated in the adopted fashion of their day.

It is confidently asserted by Dutch philosophers,-so confidently that to suppose they have not good authority for what they assert, would be very ungenerous on my part,it is asserted then by these Hollanders that Adam was created without a beard, and that the latter appendage was suddenly conferred on his chin on the very evening of the day that he had been such a "beast" as to allow himself to be beguiled into rebellion by his wife. He was consequently so far changed into the similitude of a beast, being rendered most like the goat, who is an impostor in his way, wearing

as he does the grave airs of a judge, and yet being given to very frolicsome indulgences, in which judges should not, though they often do, indulge.

If this be fact, one may wonder why Eve and her daughters generally escaped this badge of opprobrium. It was perhaps on the principle according to which we punish the receiver more than the thief. If there were no receivers there would be less pilferers; and though Eve offered the temptation, if Adam had only resisted it, the consequences would have been confined within their original narrow limits, and Mr. Mechi's razor-strops would have been without a market.

Van Helmont, in support of this theory, asks us if we ever saw a good angel with a beard;-one of those questions which are supposed by those who put them to determine a dispute at once. He falls to another conclusion thereupon; and maintains that if good angels do not wear beards, the men who do are guilty of profanity, and love goats rather than godliness. Van Helmont himself was extremely perplexed by the Jesuit casuists, who wrote on the lawfulness of beards, and who most lucidly proved, under three heads,-1st, That we are bound to shave the beard; 2nd, That we are bound to let it grow; and 3rd, That we may do either the one or the other.

St. François de Sales, the gentleman saint, was less perplexing when, on being asked by a lady whether she might not rouge, smiled, and answered, certainly, if she only painted one cheek.

Van Helmont hit the happy medium left by the Jesuitical argument, and, shaving his beard, only cultivated his mustachios.

Southey is rather inclined to accept the Dutch account of the derivation of beards, based as it is on the certainty that no man ever saw a good angel wearing one; “for,” says he, “take the most beautiful angel that ever painter

designed or engraver copied, put him on a beard, and the celestial character will be so entirely destroyed, that the simple appendage of a tail will cacodæmonize the Eudæmon." So it may be said, that a monk with a fine polished bald head is hedged with a sort of divinity, and looks altogether reverend; but only sprinkle powder from a dredging-box upon the baldness, and you make him, if not ridiculous, certainly mundane.

The English clergy do not appear to have estimated beards by Van Helmont's scale. One of the body, in the reign of Elizabeth, cherished his beard as an incentive to righteousness. "He wore it," he said, "to remind him. that no act of his life should be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance." This good gentleman's beard assuredly did not deserve what Shakspeare affirms some men's do, namely, “not so honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher's cushion, or to be entombed in an ass's pack-saddle." Henry VIII. on the other hand, would not tolerate monitorism even from his own beard, and he accordingly and characteristically cut it short. Perhaps this monarch wished also to have it out of the way of petitioners; for stroking the beard, in sign of supplication for mercy, was for thousands of years a recognized fashion, as may be seen in the Classics, and in Shakspeare, passim. It will be remembered that Hudibras stroked his own beard before he proceeded to "honour the shadow" of the lady's shoe-tie. This act has been editorially declared to have been done as in sign of asking for her favour; from the recollection, I suppose, of Thetis "palming" the chin of Jupiter; but I think it was, merely a piece of gallantry, "dressing" as it were, for the occasion, as in Congreve's Way of the World,' wherein it is said, "The gentlemen wait but to comb, Madam, and will wait on you." Formerly, no gallant ascended to a lady's boudoir without first combing his peruke at the foot of the stairs, and assuring himself, by a glance at his pocket mir

ror, that he was as well-looking a fop as ever wasted morning in talking nonsense to a speaking and painted doll.

To pull another person's beard, was to inflict on the wearer the most degrading insult that could be thought of. When the Jew, who hated and feared the living Cid Rui Dios, heard that the great Spaniard was dead, he contrived to get into the room where the body lay, and he indulged his revengeful spirit by contemptuously plucking at the beard. But the "son of somebody" (the hidalgo) was plucked temporarily into life and indignation by the outrage; and starting half up, endeavoured to get at his sword, -an attempt which killed the Jew by the mere fright which it caused.

To shave a Moslem's beard was once a penalty as terrible as to a Chinese the cutting off of his extended tail; and Christian princes have so esteemed the appendage, that they have pawned the beard, or a portion of it, for money lent, and redeemed the sacred pledge punctually at the promised hour. They would have forfeited all claim to be honoured of men, or rewarded of God, had they failed in their contract. In modern times they pledge only their words; and as words are of less value than beards, they are not so careful about the redemption thereof. That terribly mendacious personage, the Czar Nicholas, has, at all events, made his "parole de gentleman" to be synonymous with deliberate falsehood.

The beard however was long a cherished ornament of Russian chins, and the Czar Peter was accused of profanity against that orthodoxy which so distinguishes his successors by abolishing them. He certainly abolished the huge and spreading honours of the Muscovite jaws by a rough process. Taxes were laid upon them, which had their weight upon every hair; and when the recalcitrant were encountered in the street, they were seized, and their beards either torn from them, or shaved off with an oyster-knife, whereby

half the chin went with the entire beard. The loyal nobility compromised the matter by preserving their beards in their cabinets, to be buried with them. They conjectured that the angels would neither know nor welcome them if they presented themselves at Heaven's gate with clean chins: they thought more of these than of clean souls.

Taylor, the water poet, catalogues in rough rhymes the various fashions after which beards were worn. They are too tedious to enumerate, and yet do not enumerate every fashion; for omission is made of the fact that it was once the very "sweetest" mode to wear strings to the beard, as Jack the highwayman did to the knees of his breeches, and the Kings of Persia, who interwove their beards with gold thread. The "cane-coloured" beard was always held as detestable, that hue having been, according to tradition, that of the beard of the traitor Judas. The famous Count Brühl, who lost Saxony but preserved a collection of wigs, was more practical than the Water Poet. His wig museum not only contained every variety, but they were chronologically arranged, from the days of Aaron to those of the Count's own time. I may add, that I have never heard of the beard being held in dishonour except among the Chaymas, in South America, who have a great antipathy against it.

Apollo and Mercury are the only deities of olden times who are represented beardless. When professional barbers first arose it would be difficult to say; Rome got hers from where she procured her cooks-Sicily; but the Eternal City was four centuries and a half old before the chins of her sons were submitted to the handling of mercenaries. Scipio Africanus, despite the turmoil of battles, found time to shave every day; and he was the first Roman who did so. Had the Senate followed the same fashion, the invading Gaul would not have found a beard to pluck, and perhaps the city might have been saved. The old Persians were very obstinate in this respect; and they and the Tartars waged bloody