matter is your opinion of his face as
deplorable.

Not only is the recognition of what is odd in an opponent's countenance
of this priceless value in ordinary quarrels among the young and the
ill-mannered (just as abuse of the opposing counsel is the best way of
covering the poverty of one's own case at law), but the music-hall
humorist has no easier or surer road to the risibilities of most of his
audience. Jokes about faces never fail and are never threadbare.
Sometimes I find myself listening to one who has been called--possibly
the label was self-imposed--the Prime Minister of Mirth, and he
invariably enlarges upon the quaintness of somebody's features, often,
for he is the soul of impartiality, his own; and the first time, now
thirty years ago, that I ever entered a music-hall (the tiny stuffy old
Oxford at Brighton, where the chairman with the dyed hair--it was more
purple than black--used to sit amid a little company of bloods whose
proud privilege it was to pay for his refreshment), another George,
whose surname was Beauchamp, was singing about a siren into whose
clutches he had or had not fallen, who had

an indiarubber lip
Like the rudder of a ship.

--So you see there is complete continuity.

But the best example of this branch of humour is beyond all question
that of the Two Macs, whose influence, long though it is since they
eclipsed the gaiety of the nation by vanishing, is still potent. Though
gone they still jest; or, at any rate, their jests did not all vanish
with them. The incorrigible veneration for what is antique displayed by
low comedians takes care of that. "I saw your wife at the masked ball
last night," the first Mac would say, in his rich brogue. "My wife was
at the ball last night," the other would reply in a brogue of deeper
richness, "but it wasn't a masked ball." The first Mac would then
express an overwhelming surprise, as he countered with the devastating
question, "Was _that_ her face?"

"You're not two-faced, anyway. I'll say that for you," was the
apparently magnanimous concession made by one comedian to another in a
recent farcical play. The other was beginning to express his
gratification when the speaker continued: "If you were, you wouldn't
have come out with that one." Again, you observe, there is no answer to
this kind of attack. Hence, I suppose, its popularity. And yet perhaps
to take refuge in a smug sententiousness, and remark crisply, "Handsome
i