See also Leigh Hunt’s humourous paper on Lie-abeds in the Indicator, where he calls “shaving a villainous and unnecessary custom.”
To the reign of false curls, succeeded that still more egregious outrage—that climax of coxcombry—powder, pomatum, and pigtails! The former to give the snows of age to the ruddy face of youth; the latter being, I suppose, an attempt of some bright genius to outdo nature,
By hanging a stiff black tail behind, Instead of a flowing beard before, As if, by this ensign, the world to remind, How wise it had grown since old father Noah.
This was the period when every breeze was a Zephyr, every maid a Chlöe, every woman a Venus, and every fat squinting child a Cupid! Later German critics even christen the writers of this school, “the Pigtail Poets.”[39]
Seume, a German poet of a better school, in his travels says, “To-day I threw my powder apparatus out of window, when will the day come that I can send my shaving apparatus after it!”
The first French Revolution made an end of all this trumpery, and though Alison and other professed historians have not classed the event among the good things flowing from that fearful flood of blood and blasphemy, it was not one of the least, and society cannot rejoice too much at being delivered from the example of systematic frippery, frivolity, and tricked-out vice of the later French Sovereigns, imitated as they were by most of the petty puppet Princes of Germany—
Each lesser ape in his small way, Playing his antics like the greater.
About the rise of the first Napoleon to power, a more simple, severe, and classic taste, was beginning to prevail, and this dictated a return to the Beard. Under the military despotism, however, of that Emperor, moustaches were forbidden to civilians, and the Beard restrained to that petty, hairy imitation of a reversed triangle—called after its reviver, who never personally wore it—the _imperial_, as if to denote to the people that they were to have the smallest possible share in the _empire_.
With every attempt at freedom on the Continent, the Beard re-appears; it was one of the most effective standards in the war of freedom, when Germany rose against Napoleon. In 1830, it was partially revived in France, and later still it has made many a perjured continental monarch[40] “quake and tremble in his capital,” and reminded him that in spite of neglected promises and false oaths, the reign of injustice “hangs but on a hair,” of which the police will not always be able to check the free growth.