, their conversation was all the ancient world knew in the
way of society journals. Horace, George Eliot, Beaumarchais, Cervantes,
and Scott have appreciated the barber, and celebrated his
characteristics. If the wearing of the beard ever became universal, the
world, and especially the Spanish and Italian world, would sadly miss the
barber and the barber's shop. The energy of the British character, our
zeal for individual enterprise, makes us a self-shaving race; the Latin
peoples are economical, but they do not grudge paying for an easy shave.
Americans in this matter are more Continental than English in their
taste. Was it not in Marseilles that his friends induced Mark Twain to
be shaved by a barber worthy of the bottle-glass or sea-shell stage of
his profession? They pretended that his performances were equal to those
of the barber on board the ship that brought them from America.

Englishmen, as a rule, shave themselves when they do not wear beards. The
author of the little pamphlet before us gives a dozen curious hints which
prove the difficulty of the art. Almost all razors, he seems to think,
were "made to sell." He suggests that razors of tried and trusty
character, razors whose public form can be depended upon, should be
purchased of barbers. But it is not every barber who will part with such
possessions. Razors are like Scotch sheep dogs; no one would keep a bad
one, or sell, or give away a good one. Coelebs did not find the quest of
a wife more arduous than all men find that of a really responsible razor.
You may be unlucky in the important matter of lather. For soap our
author gives a recipe which reminds one of Walton's quaint prescriptions
and queer preparations. Shaving soap should be made at home, it seems,
and the mystery of its manufacture is here disclosed. The only way to
keep razors "set" is to persevere in sending them to various barbers till
the genius who can "set" them to your hand is discovered. Perhaps he
lives at Aleppo; perhaps, like the father of a heroine of comic song, at
Jerusalem. Till he is discovered the shaver wins no secure happiness,
and in the search for the barber who has an elective affinity for the
shaver may be found material for an operetta or an epic. The shaver
figures as a sort of Alastor, seeking the ideal setter of razors, as
Shelley's Alastor sought ideal beauty in the neighbourhood of
Afghanistan, and in the very home of the Central Asian Question. No