Mr W.P. Frith, R.A., published in 1887 an amusing "Autobiography," and devotes not the least attractive chapter of his work to "The Bearded Model." He relates how difficult it was to find a bearded model, and how at last he discovered one. He says that in crossing Soho Square one day his attention was drawn to a crowd of little boys, who seemed to be teasing an old man in the manner of the London street boy. "Why don't you get your 'air cut?" said one. "Yah! where's your bundle of old clothes? Yer ain't got 'em in that 'ere basket, 'ave you?" said another, "Let's 'ave a look. You're a Jew, you know; now, ain't you?" and so on. All this, observes the artist, because the old man wore a long grey beard, then such a rarity. The young gentlemen had mistaken their man. He soundly punished two elder boys, and Mr Frith found he was not a Jew. How he became a model does not come within the scope of our present studies. Mr Frith says that the head of a well-known firm of drapers in Regent Street refused to employ shopmen who wore moustaches, or men who parted their hair down the middle. In days before the moustache was popular, Mr Frith shows how even in art circles its adoption retarded progress. "I well remember," says Mr Frith, "a book illustrator named Stuart, who, according to his own notion, ought to have been on the throne of England instead of drawing on insensible wood blocks. He could trace his descent from James I. He could sing Jacobite songs, and very well, too, and he was certainly like Charles I. There was not the least doubt about his pedigree in his own mind; and he was such a nuisance when once launched into the long list of Royal blood, that we declared our unanimous conviction of the justice of his claims, and implored him to put them forward in the proper quarter, as we were powerless in the matter. The Stuart beard, exactly like the Vandyke portrait of Charles, was the treasured ornament of our friend's face, and though he was assured that the publishers felt such doubt of his abilities, and such a conviction of his utterly unreliable character and general dishonesty in consequence of his beard--one man going so far as to tell him it cost him L200 a year--he refused to remove it." Mr Frith says when the Vandyke beard became white his poor friend would have died in extreme poverty had he not received well-deserved assistance from a fund established to meet cases like his.