596 A Dissertation on Beards, [DEC. 



should stir the people up to some sudden act of mutiny and outrage. 

 During their occupation of Judea, they cut off the beard, when suffering 

 under heavy calamity but at present, as 'Change Alley, the constant 

 witness of their griefs, and gains, and glories, can testify, they reverse the 

 custom, and let it grow, probably in imitation of Mephibosheth, who left 

 his own untrimmed from the day that David departed in trouble and 

 sorrow from Jerusalem, to the day that he returned to it again triumph- 

 antly in peace. 



If I turn from the Jews to the Greeks, I find that in that early period 

 of their history, which is styled the heroic age, the beard flourished in 

 undoubted honour. There are several passages in Homer which shew, 

 that, if a vanquished enemy could succeed in touching his conqueror's 

 beard, the rude laws of war, which then prevailed, compelled him to give 

 quarter to the suppliant, who so demanded it. Young men were also 

 accustomed to cut off the first hair of their beards, and to dedicate it, with 

 great formality, to the gods, as a mark of their gratitude for the divine pro- 

 tection, which they had received during the numerous dangers of infancy 

 and childhood. This practice prevailed universally in Greece till the 

 beginning of the Pelopormesian war, when the razor first came into use, 

 and brought devastation to the blooming honours of the chin. At that 

 time, however, shaving was considered the index of the most unblushing 

 and profligate effeminacy of manners ; and the sneers which were cast 

 upon Cleisthenes, who first practised it, have survived all other accounts 

 of that dandy of antiquity. Aristophanes took every opportunity to 

 denounce the innovation, which was thus introduced into the costume of 

 the face. In his political comedy of the Knights, he makes one of the 

 characters, who is appointed general reformer of abuses, say, " that he will 

 allow no man to speak in public whose chin is not bearded ;" on which 

 another of the characters immediately asks. " Where then are Cleisthenes 

 and Strato to exercise their oratory ?" In his Ecclesiazusaa, where the 

 women disguise themselves as men, and, like our female reformers of 

 1819, attend political meetings, one of them is made to speak in terms of 

 great praise of the beautiful beard of Epicrates, and to ask whether it will 

 be possible for any body to take her for a woman, after she has tied as 

 large a beard under her chin. Agyrrius, she says, remained undiscovered 

 under the massive beard of Pronomus ; and yet the wretch was formerly a 

 woman, though he is now the greatest man in all the city. In his 

 Thesmophoriazusse, the poet stickles as strenuously for long beards as 

 ever parson stickled for heavy tythes. The fun of two or three whole 

 scenes depends entirely on the reluctance, which one of the characters 

 exhibits to be shaved. Euripides is introduced upon the stage in dreadful 

 alarm, in consequence of information which has just reached him, that 

 the women of Athens had entered into a plot to take away his life, in 

 revenge of the sneers and insults which he was perpetually casting upon 

 them in his tragedies. He requests his friend Agatho to appear in their 

 assembly as a woman, and to speak boldly in his behalf. Agatho, natu- 

 rally enough, asks, " Why the tragic poet cannot appear there in the 

 same disguise himself." Euripides replies : 



" I'll briefly state my reasons first, I'm known, 



And then, I'm old, and grey, and wear a beard. 



But you, my friend, are handsome, young, and comely, 



With smooth-shaved beard and trim ; besides, your voice 



Sounds shrilly like a woman's, whilst your gait 



