Female barbers were not unknown to our forefathers, and, till within a few years, were to be met with in the provinces: possibly some “weird sisters” still survive in odd localities. We remember a sturdy little Welsh woman who wielded the razor very successfully in her native town, and was patronized extensively by the sailors and quarrymen. The five barberesses of Drury Lane, who dreadfully maltreated a woman in the reign of Charles II., are remembered for their infamy. Local histories tell of a noted barberess in Seven Dials, and of a black woman who did duty at Butcher Row, near the Temple. The delicate manipulation of female artists is proverbial; but one shudders at the thought of encountering the armed hand of the female barber; for who has forgotten the trick which the barber-damsel put upon Don Quixote, when she raised a lather a span high, covering up his face and beard with a white foam, and then left him for awhile with his neck outstretched, and his eyes half shut, “the strangest and most ridiculous figure imaginable;” and how poor Sancho was threatened with still worse consequences, and protested loudly against the beard-scouring by the scullions, adding, with his usual shrewdness, that there was no such difference between him and his master, that one should be washed with angel water and the other with devil’s-ley. Southey informs us that female shavers were not uncommon in Spain in his day. The more feminine occupation of hair-dressing was long carried on by the other sex, in a becoming and artistic manner: witness the announcement of one of them, copied by Strutt from the original in the British Museum:-- A [Illustration] R _Next Door to the Golden Bell, St. Bride’s Lane, Fleet Street_, LYVETH LYDIA BEERCRAFT, Who cutteth and curleth ladies, gentlemen, and children’s hair.--She sells a fine pomatum, which is mix’d with ingredients of her own makeing, that if the hair be never so thin, it makes it grow thick; and if short, it makes it grow long. If any gentleman’s or children’s hair be never so lank, she makes it curle in a little time, and to look like a perriwig. It will be observed in Queen Anne’s reign no other style but that of the perriwig was thought worthy of imitation. In former times, the university barber was a person of some consequence. The vice-chancellor and proctors invited the fraternity to an annual supper, and no barber or hair-dresser could exercise his vocation in the university unless he matriculated,--took the usual oath, and had his name entered on the books of the university. It was usual for the college barber to wait upon the “freshmen,” and dress and powder them in the prevailing fashion--a custom which Southey was among the first to resist--an innovation he would scarcely have ventured on in after life.