The wig-makers (as they still denominate themselves) in Lincoln’s-inn and the Temple, are quite of the “old school.” Their shady, cool, cleanly, classic recesses, where embryo chancellors have been measured for their initiatory forensic wigs; where the powdered glories of the bench have ofttimes received a _re_-revivification; where some “old Bencher” still resorts, in his undress, to have his nightly growth of beard shaven by the “particular razor;” these powder-scented nooks, these legal dressing-closets seem, like the “statutes at large,” to resist, tacitly but effectually, the progress of innovation. They are like the old law offices, which are scattered up and down in various corners of the intricate maze of “courts,” constituting the “Temple”--unchangeable by time; except when the hand of death removes some old tenant at will, who has been refreshed by the cool-borne breezes from the river, or soothed by the restless monotony of the plashing fountain, “sixty years since.”--But I grow serious.--The barber possesses that distinction of gentleness, a soft and white hand, of genial and equable temperature, neither falling to the “zero” of chilliness, nor rising to the “fever heat” of perspiration, but usually lingering at “blood heat.” I know not if any one ever shook hands with his barber: there needs no such outward demonstration of goodwill; no grip, like that we bestow upon an old friend returned after a long absence, by way of rivet, as it were, to that link in the chain of friendship. His air of courtesy keeps a good understanding floating between him and his customers, which, if ruffled by a hasty departure, or dismissal, is revived the next day by the sun-light of his morning smile!
The barber’s hand is unlike that of any other soft hand: it is not flabby, like that of a sensualist; nor arid, and thin, like a student’s; nor dead white, like that of a delicate female; but it is _naturally_ warm, of a glowing, transparent colour, and of a cushiony, elastic softness. Beneath its conciliatory touch, as it prepares the skin for the sweeping course of the razor, and its gentle pressure, as it inclines the head to either side, to aid the operation of the scissors, a man may sit for hours, and feel no weariness. Happy must he be who lived in the days of long, or full-dressed hair, and resigned himself for a full hour to the passive luxury of hair-dressing! A morning’s toilette--(for a gentleman, I mean; being a bachelor, I am uninitiated in the arcana of a lady’s dressing-room)--a morning’s toilette in those days was indeed an important part of the “business of life:” there were the curling-irons, the comb, the pomatum, the powder-puff, the powder-knife, the mask, and a dozen other requisites to complete the elaborate process that perfected that mysterious “frappant, or tintinabulant appendage” to the back part of the head. Oh! it must have been a luxury--a delight surpassing the famed baths and cosmetics of the east.