Apollo and Mercury are the only deities of olden times who are represented beardless. When professional barbers first arose it would be difficult to say; Rome got hers from where she procured her cooks—Sicily; but the Eternal City was four centuries and a half old before the chins of her sons were submitted to the handling of mercenaries. Scipio Africanus, despite the turmoil of battles, found time to shave every day; and he was the first Roman who did so. Had the Senate followed the same fashion, the invading Gaul would not have found a beard to pluck, and perhaps the city might have been saved. The old Persians were very obstinate in this respect; and they and the Tartars waged bloody wars, and spilled oceans of blood in no better quarrel than the fashion of the beard. These heathens were almost as wicked as the Christian inhabitants of the adjacent towns of Bouvignes and Dinant, in Flanders. The people of both localities manufactured copper kettles, and each declared that the other’s ware was made after a sorry fashion. The animosity thus created led to bloody and long-continued feuds; but peace was happily restored by the time that other towns had applied themselves to the manufacture, and this gave the old antagonists the more leisure to ruminate upon their own folly. When Alexander ordered the Macedonian soldiers to shave, lest their beards should be handles whereby their enemies might capture them, smooth chins become a universal Greek fashion. It so continued to the reign of Justinian, but when the Turks took Byzantium, they would allow of beards only on the chins of the conquerors; and the Normans treated the Anglo-Saxons according to the same rule. Subsequently, in the year 1200, the Council of Lateran swept off the beards of the monks, “lest in the ceremony of receiving the sacrament, the beard might touch the bread and wine, or crumbs and drops fall and stick upon it.” The monks then were, like the Emperors, _utraquists_. Of course dispensation was to be obtained by paying for it, and it was probably _therefore_ that the decree was issued; but some wore their beards, in despite of the Church and her chancery, for the same reason that Fitzherbert Longbeard did in the Norman times, to show his independence of all superiors and their orders. If there has really been wisdom in the wig, there has been wit in the beard, or its owner. More, on the scaffold, put it out of reach of the axe, because, as he said, it had committed no treason. Raleigh, when visited by the barber of the Tower, declined to have his beard trimmed, on the ground that there was a lawsuit pending about it, between him and the King, and he would not lay out any capital on it till the cause had been decided. Raleigh’s wit reminds me of something still more witty, and quite as germane to the subject.