And while the result of shaving is a mere negation, depriving us of a natural protection, and exposing us to disease, the other process, consume what time we will, is natural and instinctive, and attended with the satisfaction of adding the grace of neatness to nature's stamp of man's nobility.
III. "That the ladies dont like it!" This Professor Burdach and Dr. Elliotson, pronounce a foul libel.[1] Ladies by their very nature like every thing manly; and though from custom the Beard may at first sight have a strange look, they will soon be reconciled to it, and think, with Beatrice, that a man without, "is only fit to be their waiting gentlewoman."[2] I have already mentioned one instance of a queen despising her husband, because he was priest-ridden enough to shave; and here I present you with a second in this veritable portrait (shewing it) of a painter in the reign of George I, of the name of Liotard,
- ↑ Old Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy adds his quaint testimony. "No sooner doth a young man see his sweetheart coming, than be smugs up himself, pulls up his cloak, ties his garter points, sets his band and cuffs, sticks his hair, twires his Beard," &c.
D'Israeli also says, "when the fair sex were accustomed to behold their lovers with Beards, the sight of a shaved chin excited feelings of horror and aversion; as much indeed as in this less heroic age would a gallant whose luxuriant Beard should Stream like a meteor to the troubled air." - ↑ The whole dialogue from whence this phrase is taken, is suggestive of the contempt with which the ladies of Elizabeth and James the 1st's time regarded a hairless chin. And there are numerous passages in our old Dramatists which might be quoted to the same effect, but that some of the allusions do not square with modern notions of delicacy.
