nties born,
Lincoln, Armagh, and Sligo did adorn.
The first in matchless impudence surpass'd,
The next in bigotry, in both the last,
The force of nature could no further go,
To beard the first she shaved the other two.

It will be noticed that the foregoing is a parody on Dryden's celebrated
tribute to Milton.

[Illustration: George Frederick Muntz, M.P.]

The enlightened electors, however, did not take kindly to the bearded
politician. It is related by Dr Hedderwick, the well-known Glasgow
journalist, that at the time the moustache movement was making slow
progress, the candidate for Linlithgowshire was an officer in the
Lancers, a man of ability, family, and fashion, who wore a heavily
hirsute upper lip. He received an intimation from a leader of his party
that his moustache might prejudice him in the eyes of a rural
population. The candidate replied that he had already considered the
point, but it was the rule in his regiment that it would be cowardly to
succumb, and that he was "determined to face it out."

We have it on good authority that a Cabinet Minister, about 1855, caused
a gentleman to be told that the beard and moustache did not look well on
a man holding a civic position under the Crown. This Minister did not
then imagine that shortly men with beards and moustaches would sit by
his side as members of the Cabinet. Even a Colonial Governor about half
a century ago was not supposed to wear a moustache. Dr Hedderwick, in
his "Backward Glances" (Edinburgh, 1891), tells us that on a certain
Sunday he was rambling with his friend, Mr Charles Maclaren, the
well-known editor of the _Scotsman_, to Loch Long, when he saw some
carriages conveying a number of ladies and gentlemen to church. "Sitting
obliquely on an Irish jaunting-car," says the doctor, "was a portly
personage with a dark heavy fringe on his upper lip, and otherwise
distinguished appearance. I suggested that it might be Sir Henry
Pottinger, the celebrated diplomatist and Colonial Governor. We knew he
had returned to England, and I had heard he was visiting in Scotland on
the banks of Loch Long. 'No, no,' said Mr Maclaren, 'it's quite
impossible it can be he. A civilian of great intelligence and sense
would never wear a moustache.'" We may gather from the foregoing the
prejudice of the period against facial adornments.

From about 1855 to some years afterwards we resided at the small town of
Alfreton, Derbyshire, where, if by c