The barber’s chair may be regarded as the centre of the system. The proverb “As common as a barber’s chair” is well known, and Shakspere’s clown adds “it fits all buttocks”--the word is not ours--the seat of honour, if you please, reader, furnished with twin cushions to protect the sacred Luz, out of which the Rabbins say the renewed mammal is to sprout forth at the resurrection, as you are probably aware. In old prints, the chattels of a barber’s shop are usually few and mean enough; but the chair--the descendant of the _sella tonsoria_--bears some rude flourishes of art, is broad and massive and well-cushioned, as became the throne of so many grave potentates. One is as much astonished at the size of the combs, scissors, and razors of the ancient barbers as at the giant arms and armour worn by the knights of old. What ponderous blades these artists wielded it is fearful to contemplate. There is an old joke that some barber advertised shaving by the acre, and cutting blocks with a razor one would think not impossible with such weapons. Actius’ razor, which was of the keenest, must have been after this fashion. As razors are of very old date, it may interest some one to know that, long before Sheffield or Sheffield blades were thought of, Palermo did business in their commodity. The presiding deity was not unfrequently the greatest curiosity about the place. A certain knack of snapping the fingers was a common practice among them; tradition says, it recalled to mind the clicking of the shears used by their great ancestors. Morose, in Ben Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” so detested this sound, as indeed he did noises of all kind, that meeting with a barber who was without this trick of his profession, he thought it so eminent a virtue, that he made him chief of his counsel, which reminds one of Adrian’s rebuke to his gossip of a barber, who, in reply to the man’s query how he should like to be shaved, said--silently! But barber’s were better employed than in curing the ill-humours of the Morose family. In Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses (1583) is a dialogue about old barbers, which we will in part transcribe: