In person the barber usually inclines to the portly; but is rarely obese. His is that agreeable plumpness betokening the man at ease with himself and the world--and the utter absence of that fretfulness ascribed to leanness. Nor do his comely proportions and fleshiness make leaden the heels, or lessen the elasticity of his step, or transmute his feathery lightness of hand to heaviness. He usually wears powder, for it looks respectable, and is professional withal. The last of the almost forgotten and quite despised race of pigtails, once proudly cherished by all ranks--now proscribed, banished, or, if at all seen, diminished in stateliness and bulk, “shorn of its fair proportions,”--lingers fondly with its former nurturer; the neat-combed, even-clipped hairs, encased in their tight swathe of black ribbon, topped by an airy bow, nestle in the well-clothed neck of the modern barber. Yet why do I call him _modern_? True, he lives in our, but he belongs to former times, of which he is the remembrancer and historian--the days of bags, queues, clubs, and periwigs, when a halo of powder, pomatum, and frizzed curls encircled the heads of our ancestors. That glory is departed; the brisk and agile tonsor, once the genius of the toilet, no longer directs, with the precision of a cannoneer, rapid discharges of scented atoms against bristling batteries of his own creation. “The _barber’s_ occupation’s gone,” with all the “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious _wigs_!” Methinks I detect some unfledged reader, upon whose head of hair the sun of the eighteenth century never shone, glancing his “mind’s eye” to one of the more recent and fashionable professors of the art of “_ciseaurie_”--one of the chemical perfumers, or self-esteemed practitioners of the present day, in search of an exemplification of my description:--he is at fault. Though _he_ may deem Truefit or Macalpine models of skill, and therefore of description, I must tell him I recognise none such. I speak of the last generation, (between which and the present, Ross, and Taylor of Whitechapel, are the connecting links,) the last remnants of whom haunt the solitary, well-paved, silent corners, and less frequented streets of London--whose windows exhibit no waxen busts, bepainted and bedizened in fancy dresses and flaunting feathers, but one or two “old original” blocks or _dummies_, crowned with sober-looking, respectable, stiff-buckled, brown wigs, such as our late venerable monarch used to wear. There is an aboriginal wig-maker’s shop at the corner of an inn-yard in Bishopsgate-street; a “repository” of hair; the window of which is full of these primitive caxons, all of a sober brown, or simpler flaxen, with an occasional contrast of rusty black, forming, as it were, a finis to the by-gone fashion. Had our first forefather, Adam, been bald, he could not have worn a more simply artificial imitation of nature than one of these wigs--so frank, so