The Roman Philosophers, like the Greek, cherished a long Beard as the emblem of wisdom. The following anecdote shews that it was sometimes a fallacious sign. One of the Emperors being pestered by a man in a long robe and Beard, asked him what he was. “Do you not see that I am a philosopher?” was the reply. “The cloak I see, and the Beard I see,” said the Emperor, “but the philosopher, where is he?” I must not conclude this notice of Roman customs without mentioning the instructive fact, that the slaves of the early Romans were shaved as a mark of servitude, and not allowed to wear the distinctive sign of a free man until emancipated. At a later period the slaves, as the most manly, wore the Beard, and only shaved when entitled to be put on a level with their debased and vicious masters! [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. A BRIEF glance at Ecclesiastical History will furnish one or two interesting matters. Most of the Fathers of the Church both wore and approved of the Beard. Clement, of Alexandria, says, “nature adorned man like the lion, with a Beard, as the index of strength and empire.” Lactantius, Theodoret, St. Augustine, and St. Cyprian, are all eloquent in praise of this natural feature: about which many discussions were raised in the early ages of the Church, when matters of discipline necessarily engaged much of the attention of its leaders. To settle these disputes, at the 4th Council of Carthage, held A.D. 252, canon 44, it was enacted “that a clergyman shall _not cherish his hair nor shave his Beard_.” (Clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam radat.) And Bingham quotes an early letter, in which it is said of one who from a layman had become a clergyman, “his habit, gait, modesty, countenance, and discourse, were all _religious_, and _agreeably to these his hair was short and his Beard long_;” shewing that in those early times St. Paul was better understood than at a later date. Subsequently the Beard was alternately commended to the clergy for its becoming gravity, or condemned from the ascetic notion that pride was apt to lurk in a fine Beard. In some of the monasteries lay members wore the Beard, while those in orders were shaved, and the hairs, remnant of an earlier superstition, devoutly consecrated to God with special prayers and imposing ceremonies. One order of the Cistercians were specially allowed to wear their Beards, and were hence called “fratres barbati” or Bearded brethren. The military orders of the Church, as the Knights of St. John and the Templars, were always full Bearded. To touch the Beard, was at one time a solemnity by which a godfather acknowledged the child of his adoption.