The truth was, that the divine spark was
burning too fiercely within. In vain Dr.
Corona exerted his art and endeavoured,
moreover, to wean Maria for awhile from the
studio. The hectic flush and the brilliant
eyes proved true prophets.

The Minerva was the only work of the servant
Maria; who died on the twelfth of May,
eighteen hundred and one.

WHY SHAVE?

THERE are misguided men—and I am one
of them—who defile daily their own beards,
rasp them away as fast as they peep out from
beneath the skin, mix them ignominiously
with soap-suds, and cause them to be cast
away with the offscourings of the house. We
are at great pains and trouble to do this, and
we do it unwillingly, knowing that we
deprive our faces of an ornament, and more
or less suspecting that we take away from
ourselves something given to us by nature
for our use and our advantage; as indeed we
do. Nevertheless, we treat our beards as so
much dirt that has to be removed daily from
our persons, for no other reason than because
it is the custom of the country; or, because
we wish (according to the French philosopher
whom we largely quote in another paper in
this number), because we strive to make ourselves
prettier by assimilating our appearance
to that of women.

I am no friend to gentlemen who wilfully
affect external oddity, while they are within
all dull and commonplace. I am not disposed
by carrying a beard myself to beard
public opinion. But opinions may change;
we were not always a nation of shavers.
The day may again come when " 'T will be
merry in hall, when beards wag all," and
Britons shall no more be slaves to razors.

I have never read of savages who shaved
themselves with flints; nor have I been able
to discover who first introduced among civilised
men the tonsure of the chin. The shaven
polls and faces of ecclesiastics date from the
time of Pope Anacletus, who introduced the
custom upon the same literal authority of
scripture that still causes women to wear
bonnets in our churches, that they may not
pray uncovered. Saint Paul, in the same
chapter, further asks the Corinthians, " Doth
not even nature itself teach you, that, if a
man have long hair it is a shame unto him?"
Pope Anacletus determined, therefore, to
remove all shame from churchmen, by ordering
them to go shaven altogether. The shaving
of the beard by laymen was, however, a practice
much more ancient. The Greeks taught
shaving to the Romans, and Pliny records
that the first Greek barbers were taken from
Sicily to Rome by Publius Ticinius, in the
four hundred and fifty-fourth year after the
building of the city. The Greeks, however—
certainly it was so with them in the time of
Alexander—seem to have been more disposed
to use their barbers for the pruning and
trimming than for the absolute removal of
the beard, and of that ornament upon the
upper lip which they termed the mystax, and
which we call—using the same name that they
gave to it, slightly corrupted—moustache. In
the best days of Greece few but the philosophers
wore unpruned beards. A large
flowing beard and a large flowing mantle
were in those times as naturally and essentially
a part of the business of a philosopher,
as a signboard is part in these days of the
business of a publican. So there is a small
joke recorded of an emperor, who having been
long teazed by an importunate talker, asked
him who or what he was. The man replied
in pique, " Do you not see by my beard and
mantle that I am a philosopher ? "—" I see the
beard and mantle," said the emperor, " but
the philosopher, where is he?"

The idea that there existed a connection
between a man's vigour of mind and body,
and the vigour of growth in his beard, was
confirmed by the fact that Socrates, the
wisest of the Greek philosophers, earned
pre-eminently the title of the bearded. Among
races of men capable of growing rich crops
on the chin, the beard has always been regarded
more or less as a type of power.
Some races, as the Mongolians, do not get
more than twenty or thirty thick coarse
hairs, and are as likely then to pluck them
out after the fashion of some northern
tribes, as to esteem them in an exaggerated
way, as has been sometimes the case in
China. In the world's history the bearded
races have at all times been the most important
actors, and there is no part of the body
which on the whole they have shown more
readiness to honour. Among many nations,
and through many centuries, development of
beard has been thought indicative of the
development of strength, both bodily and
mental. In strict accordance with that feeling
the strength of Samson was made to rest
in his hair. The beard became naturally
honoured, inasmuch as it is a characteristic
feature of the chief of the two sexes (I speak
as an ancient), of man, and of man only, in
the best years of his life, when he is capable
of putting forth his independent energies. As
years multiply and judgment ripens the beard
grows, and with it grows, or ought to grow,
every man's title to respect. Grey beards
became thus so closely connected with the
idea of mature discretion, that they were
taken often as its sign or cause; and thus it
was fabled of the wise king Numa, that he
was gray-haired even in his youth.

To revert to the subject of shaving. Tacitus
says that in his time the Germans cut their
beards. In our times among that people the
growth of a beard, or at least of a good
mystax or moustachio, had come by the year
eighteen hundred and forty-eight to be
regarded so much as a mark of aristocracy
that after the revolutions of that year the