It is a note-worthy historical fact, which shews the danger arising from discarding the natural for the artificial, that as _Beards died out, false hair came in_. A mountain of womanish curls rested on the head, and was made to fall in effeminate ringlets over neck and shoulders, while the whole face was kept as smooth, and smug, and characterless as razor could make it. This renders it so disagreeable a task to look through a series of Kneller’s portraits, who, clever as he was, could not impart the freedom and vigour of nature to this absurd fashion. A portrait of Addison,[37] was shewn as an illustration, because, as has been seen, though he complied with the mode, he was occasionally favored with visions of better times, past and to come.[38]
I cannot refrain from alluding in a note to a curious fact. On the day this Lecture was given, a little boy was brought to look at the portraits just after they were hung. I said to him, “Edward, which face do you like best?” He instantly touched the portrait of Addison, and said, “that’s the best woman,” and “that’s the best man!” pointing to the well-bearded face of Leonardo da Vinci.
That Southey had the same compunctious visitings as Addison, appears clearly enough, for while in his Doctor he compares “shaving at home” with “slavery abroad;” states that “a good razor is more difficult to meet with, than a good wife;” denounces the practice “as preposterous and irrational,” as “troublesome, inconvenient,” and attended with “discomfort, especially in frosty weather and March winds;” places it on an equality with the curse pronounced on Eve; and concludes with the opinion that “if the daily shavings of one year could be put into one shave, the operation would be more than flesh and blood could bear;” he has nothing to say in favour of shaving, but that it encourages Barbers, compels the shaver to some moments of calm thought and reflection, and enables him to draw lessons from the looking glass that nobody with razor in hand ever thought of. These words in another place give a key to his real opinion. “If I wore a Beard,” he writes, “I would cherish it as the Cid Campeador did his, for my pleasure. I would regale it on a Summer’s day with rose-water, and without making it an idol, I should sometimes offer incense to it with a pastille, or with lavender and sugar. My children, when they were young enough for such blandishments, would have delighted to comb and stroke and curl it, and my grandchildren in their time would have succeeded to the same course of mutual endearment.”