nevertheless. Truly, man is always the greatest monster when he least thinks of it.
But is not, in spite of all aesthetics, a beard, especially a beard under the nose, considered to be just as indispensable an attribute of manliness as the fuming instrument called a pipe or cigar, with which even ten-year-old fire-eaters practice manliness, until they, like other volcanoes, emit smoke followed by an eruption? How very cheap is this manliness, whose credentials are a bush of hair and a cloud of smoke! Even the ancients felt that this pretentious growth of hair was a superfluous addition, or a cheap ornament, and they tried to get rid of it by the aid of burning nutshells and similar expedients. But since the razor has been invented, this greatly depreciated instrument of civilization, almost all intellectual men have attempted to free themselves of this animal distinction, and to show their human physiognomy openly to the world. We can no more think of a Rousseau or Voltaire, a Schiller and Goethe, a Lessing and Boerne, a Kant and Hegel, a Mozart and Beethoven with a mustache, or a Henry IV., than we can think of the hero-emperor, and his blood-and-iron men, without bristles in their faces. But this man of bristles cannot hide his taste for the barracks, even behind the diplomat, unlike that French ambassador to the Turkish court, who, when the Sultan made some remarks about his smooth face, answered: "If my master had known that the beard was considered the principal thing
