AZORS,

should have been my taking title; and perchance the learned treatise
might have been characteristically illustrated with steel cuts. Shaving
is a wider topic than most people think for; it is a species of insanity
that has afflicted man in all ages, deprived him of nature's best
adornment in every country under heaven. So contradictorily too; as
thus: the Spanish friar shaves all but a rim round his head, which rim
alone sundry North American aborigines determine to extirpate; John
Chinaman nourishes exclusively a long cue, just on that same inch of
crown-land which the P.P. sedulously keeps as bare as his palm: all the
Orientals shave the head, and cherish the beard; all the Occidentals
immolate the beard, and leave the honours of the head untouched. Then,
again, the strange successive fashions in this same unnatural, unneedful
depilation; look at the vagaries of young France: not to descend also to
savage men, and their clumsy shell-scrapings; and to devote but little
time to the voluminous topic of wigs, male and female, cavalier and
caxon, Marlborough and monstrous maccaroni--from the plaited
Absalom-looking periwig of a Pharaoh in the British Museum, to
Truefitt's last patent self-adjuster. Of all these follies, and their
root a razor, might we show the manifest absurdity: we might argue upon
Eastern stupidity as caused by thickness of the skull, such thickness
being the substitute for thatchy hair suggested by kind ill-used Nature
as the hot brain's best protection: we might reason upon the average
sheepishness of this peaceful West, as due to having shorn the lion of
his mane, Phoebus of his glory, man of his majestic beard. Then the
martyrdom it is to many! who stoically, day after day, persist in
scratching to the quick their irritable chins, and after all to little
better end than the diligent earning of tooth-aches, ear-aches, colds,
sore throats, and unbecoming blank faces. Habit, it is true, makes us
deem that a comfort, and our better halves (or those we would fain have
so) think that a beauty, which our forerunners of old time would have
held a plague, a disgrace, a deformity, a mortification: prisoned
paupers in the Union think it an insufferable hardship to go bearded,
and King David's ambassadors would have given their right eyes _not_ to
have been shaved; so much are we the slaves of custom: Sheffield also,
it is equally true, is a town that humane men would not wish to ruin; by
razors they of