dwindled down to little better than military mustachios. One beard there is, however, so pre-eminent at that stormy period, as to deserve being handed down, by the genius of Butler, to posterity, as the Ultima Barbarum. I refer to that of Hudibras.

In cut and dye so like a tile,

At sudden view it would beguile;
The upper part thereof was whey,
The nether orange mixed with grey.

Passing over to Spain, we shall not find the grave and magniloquent Spaniard behind other nations in high appreciation of beards. Quevedo, in his Third Vision of Judgment, introduces one of his countrymen, whose beard had been disordered while he was receiving sentence, refusing to file off in the guardianship of a brace of evil spirits, till they had recomposed the ruffled emblem of dignity with a pair of curling irons. But none carry their affectionate respect for this distinguishing characteristic of man to a greater length than the Turks. It is, among them, the mark of liberty and authority, and many a Turk would prefer death to losing it. It is anointed and perfumed, as if it were sacred, and its preservation is a capital article of the Mahometan religion. A Turkish wife kisses the beard of her husband; a child that of his father; friends swear by it, and in parting, reciprocally kiss each other's beards with respectful devotion. They even gather up the hairs which drop from their beards while combing them, fold them up carefully in paper, and carry them for inhumation to the place where they bury the dead.

Nor was the Christian church, at one time, behind the Mahometan religion in reverence. Not only provincial

and national, but general, councils have been convened, synods have been summoned, and cloistered chapters of every denomination have been assembled, to consider at different periods the character of this venerable growth of the human visage. Infinite disputes have been engendered, sometimes with respect to its form, at others with regard to its existence. The Catholic church in one age interested itself in contending for that pointed form to which nature conducts it; at a succeeding period anathemas have been denounced against those who refused to give it a rounder shape; and to these other denunciations have followed, which changed it to the square or the scallop.

Hitherto the disputes were confined to the Western Church; but when innovation grasped the tonsors; when the beard lessened into whiskers, and the scythe of ecclesiastical discipline threatened to mow down every hair from off the "human face divine," the churches of Asia and Africa took the alarm, and supported by violence, invective, and remonstrance, their right and title to those undiminished honours of the chin which they enjoyed in the west.

The Gallic church alone made any effectual stand against the radical change of the ecclesiastical razor. Fierce contests were waged with various success by the Barbites and Anti-Barbites; at length a compromise was made; and the bishops compounded the matter with their refractory clergy, by giving up the greater part of the beard, but retaining the growth of the upper lip in the form of whiskers. Tranquillity was thus restored; and the preacher of peace, for a considerable time after, appeared on all public occasions en moustache, exhibiting to his highly-edified flock the fierce terrific aspect

of a German pandour, as an emblem of the church mili

tant.

At length, the persecuted beard was driven from this, its last important place of refuge in our quarter of the globe, and, if we except the corner of European Turkey, now finds its only asylum in the Capuchin cloister.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

I will conclude with an anecdote expressive of the distinctive character of the beard, as felt by unsophisticated minds.

Bougainville, when touching at Otaheite, was accustomed to leave there a couple of some kind of European domestic animals. In his last voyage, he had on board a Capuchin and a Franciscan, who, as is well known, differ from each other in the single circumstance of one having the beard shaved, and in the other suffering it to grow on the chin.

The natives, who had successively admired the various animals as they were disembarked, whether bulls and cows, hogs and sows, or he and she goats, shouted with joy at the appearance of the Capuchin. "What a noble animal! what a pity there is not a pair!" Scarcely was the wish expressed, when the shaven Franciscan made his "Huzza," exclaimed the savages, "" we've

appearance.
got the male and the female !"

ANCIENT ATHENS, AND PARIS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION.

(Translated from the French of M. de Jaucourt.) POSSESSING a lively imagination, the Athenians, as Plutarch observes, were more addicted to form opinions upon any subject, than to acquire the knowledge necessary to put those opinions in execution. Extremely courteous and full of respect towards the female sex, the houses of married men were never searched whilst their wives were resident in them; and this courtesy was carried so far, that even in time of war, the letters which the enemy had written to the Athenian ladies were sent back unopened.

Their robes were purple, and their tunics were of various colours, embroidered in the Phrygian fashion. The ladies carried their passion for dress to a ridiculous extreme; they wore grasshoppers of gold in their hair, and figs of gold in their ears; and upon their robes, every ornament calculated to render their appearance striking and splendid. Every day they invented new fashions; every day they walked to the Dipylon, to exhibit themselves to the gaze of the admiring multitude. The Roman women taught them to adorn their complexions with artificial brilliance, where nature had denied it. The Lacedæmonian women doubted not that they were beautiful; the Athenian women believed themselves to be So, because they arrayed themselves in a manner admirably adapted to conceal their defects. They were extremely hurt, when foreigners, in their presence, praised the agility displayed by the Lacedæmonian women in mounting on horseback, their short robes, their watered stuffs, their gauzes, the manufacture of Cos, their hats made of the reeds of the Eurotas, the beauty of their complexion, and the elegance

of their figure. In despair, they demanded of these foreigners, their countenances expressing disdain, if it was the black broth upon which the Lacedæmonians lived which added beauty to their complexion, or elegance to their figure.

They perfumed their woollen garments with the herb Parthenion, with which the walls of the Acropolis were covered, and of which they always carried bags in their pockets. In winter, they amused themselves with feasts in honour of Bacchus; in summer, they walked sometimes to the Piræus, sometimes in the meadow called the Enæon, which was surrounded with groves of poplars, sometimes to the gyron,-this was the place where the Icarian peasants acted their farces by daylight; and for the purpose of witnessing them, the people had here erected rows of seats. To form their style, they read the productions of the day; they kept in their little libraries a collection of the theatrical pieces of Cratinus, Eupolis, Menander, Aristophanes, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and also the poems of Damophila, Sappho, and Anacreon. The transcribers conceived the idea of copying, for the use of the Athenian women, all these works in a small uniform size, and the sale of them was incredible.

They received in the establishment called the Cynotarge, all the illegitimate children, and those mothers who wished to be confined there; this useful establishment, however, was not successful from the following circumstance. The Athenians, naturally prone to talk too much, could not preserve silence even in matters of this nature; and the discovery of a secret of this kind prevented all the Athenian women of a certain rank, who, unhappily for themselves, discovered that they were pregnant, from profiting by an asylum whose secrets were so openly violated.