Benjamin Suddlechop, in Scott’s “Fortunes of Nigel,” has become the model barber of our popular literature; the sketch is confessedly a slight one, and, indeed, after Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, and Le Sage--not to mention others--have given their delineations of the character, the barbers stand in need of no further help to fame. Even Suddlechop had some music in his soul; his shop in Fleet-street resounded with the tinklings of the guitar, where the lover, if so inclined, might warble “a woeful ballad to his mistress’ eyebrows,” or flay some spell-bound Marsyas with sounds by no means “As sweet and musical As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair.” But what shall we say to Suddlechop’s little back shop, from which he supplied his customers with strong waters. We consider this a sad blot upon his fame. Many of the barbers sold cordials and compounded English _aqua-vitæ_, and to them we are indebted for some of the earliest recipes for British brandy--an abominable mixture, which, like the filthy poison known as gin, has destroyed more victims than ever groaned under the lancet of the barber-surgeon. Could these worthies have foreseen what scandalous things would come of this gin drinking, how “The vitriol madness flashes up in the ruffian’s head, Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,” what disease, and want, and wretchedness, and crime, are engendered of this poison to men’s souls--all to build up the fortunes of a few wealthy capitalists--we are sure even the strong nerves of the dashing barber would have failed him, and he would have turned with loathing from the hateful traffic. Rabelais makes Pope Calixtus a woman’s barber in the other world, which might be a very salutary discipline for a proud pontiff; and we put it to the prince of jovial drinkers himself to suggest any more fitting purgatorial chastisement for the gin-fire aristocracy, than that of compelling them to drink their own vile compounds: Prometheus, bound to the rock, with the vulture preying on his liver, would be but a faint type of their misery. Before we dismiss Suddlechop, we have to remark that though dame Ursula, his wife, carried on the sale of cosmetics and perfumes, and dealt in other mysteries in her own room at hand, the business of a perfumer, as the term is now understood, had nothing to do with the ancient craft of barbery; such matters concerned St. Veronica and the milliners--the barbers and their patron saint, St. Louis, were engaged on higher mysteries. To preserve order, or, more probably, to promote merriment, a list of forfeits was hung up in the shop; those who chose to pay them did, and those who did not might laugh at them-- “like the forfeits in a barbers shop, As much in mock as mark.”