I have said that the eminent lawyers of modern times are greatly favored in the inheritance of old jokes. Judge Jeffries, we are told, in examining an old fellow with a long beard, told him he supposed he had a conscience quite as long as that natural ornament of his visage. 'Does your lordship measure consciences by beards?' said the man; 'that is strange, seeing you yourself are shaven.' Among the monk-Latin tales there is one to the effect that a certain _pater_, priding himself on his beard, was informed that in a convent of he-goats he certainly deserved to be abbot. The same story, re-made into a gross form, is current in this country, and attributed to an eminent Virginia politician. In the _Antidotum Melancholiae_ (Frankfort, 1667), it is given in the form of an evidently very old Latin rhyme: 'Si bene barbatum faceret sua barba beatum, Nullus in hoc circo fuerit felicior hireo.' There is a modern story current in America, which is often circumstantially narrated, of some individual wearing a fine beard or 'whiskers,' and who is said to have sold them to a vulgar practical joker, who had one shaved off, but suffered the other to remain for a long time on the face of his victim, annoying him meantime with inquiries as to 'my whisker.' It is the true type of a great number of stories which originated in the Southern and South-Western United States, the point of which almost invariably turns on vexing, grieving, or maltreating some victim, who is an inferior as regards wit, fortune, or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, which, emanating from the South, have contributed so much to brutalize and vulgarize the humorous tendencies of that portion of the more Northern public which reads them. But to return to the story of the half shaven beard. It also is a very old one, being told in its original form as _Barba deceptus Judaeus_--'The Jew deceived by a beard,' and is as follows: 'A nobleman of Frankfort, while being shaved in a barber's shop, was summoned by a Jew to whom he owed money. But at the request of his debtor the Jew consented to forego the arrest until the nobleman's beard should be shaved. Upon which the latter departed unshorn, and ever remained so.'