Barbers, by common consent, enjoy a most enviable reputation. Both in fact and fiction they are the representatives of shrewdness and good nature; and in some of the choicest literature extant, the sayings and doings of the brethren of the craft are among the best of their kind. It would be a dull world without Figaro. The barber’s shop was for centuries the emporium of gossip, the idler’s club; and when the young Roman wished to meet with a rake as pleasure-loving as himself, he sought him at the barber’s, possibly to contrive how to steal away some old man’s daughter or his money-bags. And thither came the old miser to get his finger-nails clipped, taking care, however, to take the parings away with him. All classes frequented the barber’s shop; and we may suppose the lively satirists of old visited the spot, as Molière did the barber of Pezenas, to find material for some of their best sketches of character. The Roman barbers, it must be confessed, were somewhat garrulous, and their tongues went as nimbly as their shears. Like the moderns, they put a rough cloth round the patient, as we are half inclined to call the customer who submitted to the operation, for we fear their razors were none of the best, for some preferred to have their beards plucked out by means of plasters applied to the face, and then those terrible tweezers completed the work, pulling out the stray hairs the razors or plasters had left behind. Some wealthy men had the duties of the barber performed by their own slaves, but the shops were thronged with customers, and the tonsor was at all times the most obedient and obliging servant of the public. One of the peculiarities of their art was the clicking of the shears, to which Juvenal makes allusion: “He whose officious scizzors went snip, snip, As he my troublesome young beard did clip.” Several of these worthies attained to great distinction, and rose from the shop to the senate.