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 Sheffield live, and shaving is their substance. But, as
in the case of the smoother and softer sex, we are convinced that the
wand of fashion would presently convert their heterodox anti-barbal
prejudices: so, in the case of harder-ware Sheffield, while we hope to
live to see razors regarded as antiquarian rarities, (even as a
watchman's rattle, or the many-caped coats of the semi-extinct class
_Welleria coachmanensis_ are now some time become,) still we desire all
possible multiplication to the tribe of trimming scissors. Like Ireland,
we shout for long-denied justice; give us our beards. That reasonable
indulgence shall never be abused; our Catholic emancipation of moustache
and imperial, whisker and the rest, shall not be a pretence for lion's
manes, or the fringe of goats and monkeys: we would not so far follow
unsophisticated nature as to relapse into barbarous wild men; but
diligently squaring, pointing, combing, and perfuming those natural
manly decorations, after the most approv