ART. VIII. THE HUMAN POLL AND THE BARBER'S. La Pigonotomie, ou L'art D'apprendre a se Raser Soi-Meme, avec la maniere de connoître toutes sortes de Pierres propres à affiler tous les outils ou instruments; et les moyens de preparer les cuirs pour repasser les Resoirs, la maniere d'enfaire de trés-bons; suivi d'une Observation importante sur la Saignée. Par J. J. Perret, Maître et Marchand Coutilier, Ancien Jeré-Garde. A Paris, Ches Dufour, Libraire, Rue de la Vieille-Draperie, vis-a-vis L'Eglise Sainte Croix, au Bon Pasteur: MDCCLXIX. In the last number of this Review, under the head A Corsair Expression, we wrote of those intensely capillary attractions, at least to young ladies, who, as Byron says in Beppo," Sinell of bread and butter;" and we threatened the reader with a paper on Wigs and such like things, and we now, to fulfil our threat, produce our paper as named above-"The Human Poll and the Barber's.' The beautiful features and personal attractions of the fair sex, are especially set off to advantage, by that ornament to the persona fine head of hair; whether the auburn tresses fall in many a graceful fold; the rich and glossy curls are bound with roses, or "The long dark hair, Floats upon the forehead in loose waves Unbraided." The pillar of the Ionic order, in the composition of which, both elegance and ingenuity are displayed, is said to have been constructed upon the model of a beautiful woman with flowing soft hair: "Her ringlets unconfined, About her neck and breast luxuriant play." This architectural pillar presents a marked contrast to the Doric, which is formed after the model of a strong robust man. There is not a voluptuous or luxurious scene in poetry or romance, into which a description of the heroine's hair is not introduced. "Richer treasures than her hair Never yet did forehead bear; Without this elegant ornament crowning the stature with grace, even the goddess of Beauty, though possessed of the brightest eyes, and the most fascinating charms, would appear hideous and deformed. When Homer mentions the celebrated fair who set all Asia in arms, he invariably call her the "beautifulhaired Helen." Apuleius maintains, that if Venus were bald, though circled by the graces and the loves, she would not please even swarthy Vulcan. Petronius, in his picture of Circe, describes her tresses, falling negligently over her shoul ders, which they entirely covered. Apuleius praises her trailing locks, thick and long, and insensibly curling, disposed over her divine neck, softly undulating with carelessness -“Whose golden hair Around her sunny face in clusters hung." Ovid notices those beauties who plaited their braided hair like spiral shells. Amasia is described with hair distilling the perfumes of myrrh and roses; and that of Venus, as diffusing around the divine odors of ambrosia Coleridge speaks of "Mirth of the loosely flowing hair." Though the bards of Hellas may boast of a "Hypsipyle," that gorgeous beauty whose hair fell flowingly to her feet;yet would she bear but poor comparison with the beauties of our own favored land, who are universally eulogised for the luxuriant and silky glossiness of their hair; and the praiseworthy attention they pay to the duties of the toilet. In no country in the world is more attention paid to the hair than in Great Britain; and unlike other nations there is no set fashion or uniformity of practice in wearing it, every female exercising her own good taste, and taxing her ingenuity in displaying her beautiful hair to the best advantage according to the contour of the face. This variety is pleasing, and one is delighted in a mixed fashionable assemblage to glance from head dress to head dress, witnessing here the hair flowingfreely in ringlets, waving unconfined over neck and shoulders; there crisp set curls, framing the temples and blooming cheeks anon braids and plain Madonna bands set off with a simple flower or wreath. Another has elaborately woven and twined masses adorning the back of the head interlaced with ribbon or pearls :-each eye forming its own beauty. " " The natural hair, observes a modern writer, after its long term of imprisonment, seemed for a moment to have run wild. The portraits of the beginning of the century, and even down to the time of Lawrence's supremacy, show the hair falling thick upon the brow, and flowing, especially in the young, over the shoulders. Who can ever forget, that has once seen it, the portrait of young Lindley in the Dulwich gallery by Sir Thomas; that noble and sad looking brow, so softly shaded with luxuriant curls? At the present moment almost every lady one meets has her hair arranged in "bands;" nothing but bands the most severe and trying of all coiffures, and one only adapted to the most classic style of beauty. For the face, with a downright good-natured pug nose, or with one that is only pleasantly retroussé, to adopt it is quite as absurd as for an architect to surmount an irregular Elizabethan building with a Doric frieze. Every physiognomy requires its peculiar arrangement of hair, and we only wonder that this great truth has ever been lost sight of. There is a kind of hair full of graceful waves, which, in Ireland, is called good-natured hair. There is something quite charming in its rippling line across the forehead. Art has attempted to imitate it, but the eye immediately detects the imposture it no more resembles the real thing, than the set smile of the opera-dancer does the genuine play of the features from some pleasurable emotion of the mind. This buckled hair is, in short, the same as that denounced by the early churchmen under the name of the malice of the D-l, a term which it well deserves. There is another kind of hair which is inclined to hang in slender thread-like locks, just on the sides of the face, allowing the light and shade to fall upon the white skin beneath with delightful effect. Painters particularly affect this picturesque falling of the hair, and it is wonderful how it softens the face, and gives archness to the eyes, which peep out, as it were, between their own trellis work or jalousies, We own to a love of the soft glossy ringlets which dally and toy with the light on their airy curves, and dance with every emotion of the body. There is something exceedingly feminine and gentle in them, we think, which makes them more fitted for general adoption than any other style. But most of all to be admired for a noble generous ཨཙྪཱ། countenance, is that compromise between the severe looking "band" and the flowing ringlet, in which the hair, in twisting coils of flossy silk, is allowed to fall from the forehead in a delicate sweep round that part of the cheek where it melts into the neck, and is then gathered up into a single shell-like convolution behind; the Greeks were particularly fond of this arrangement in their sculpture, because it repeated the facial outline, and displayed the head to perfection. Some naturally pretty women, following the lead of the strong-minded hightempled sisterhood, are in the habit of sweeping their hair at a very ugly angle off the brow so as to show a tower of forehead, and, as they suppose, produce an overawing impression. This is a sad mistake, Corinna, supreme in taste as in genius and beauty, knows better. The ancients were never guilty of thinking a vast display of forehead beautiful in woman, or that it was in fact, at all imposing in appearance. They invariably set the hair on low, and would have stared with horror at the atrocious practice of shaving it at the parting, adopted by some people to give height to the brow. We do not mean to lay down any absolute rule; however, even in this particular, the individuality which exists in every person's hair, as much as in their faces, should be allowed to assert itself, and the dead level of bands should never be permitted to extinguish the natural difference between the tresses of brown Dolores-blue-black, lustrous, thick as horsehair," and the Greek Islanders' hair like sea-moss that Alciphron speaks of. Least of all is such an abomination as "fixature" allowable for one moment. He must have been a bold bad man indeed, who first circulated the means of solidifying the soft and yielding hair of woman. Hair, most unquestionably, constitutes the proudest ornament of female beauty; and clustering locks, compared, both by the ancients and oriental poets, to the growth of grapes, has even been considered a desideratum at the female toilet; artificial means to curl the hair having been resorted to from time immemorial, even by man. We find Virgil speaking contemptuously of Eneas for the care he took of his locks: Vibratos calido ferro myrrhaque madentes. The Romans called a man who thus frizzled himself homo calimistratus. Crisp and curled ringlets were ever admired, and Petrarch thus describes them Aura che quelle chiome bionde e crespe E poi'l raccogli, e'n bei nod! l'increspe. The royal family of France had it as a particular mark and privilege of the kings and princes of the blood to wear long hair, artfully dressed and curled. Long hair for men went out of fashion during the Protectorate of Cromwell, and hence the term "Roundheads." It again became unfashionable in 1705; and very short hair was the mode in 1801. St. Paul (1 Corinthians, chap. xi. ver. 14-15) writes-~~ "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering." T “No reason," observes the Rev. Albert Barnes, when commenting on this passage, can be given, in the nature of things, why the woman should wear long hair and the man not; but the custom prevails extensively everywhere, and nature in all nations, has prompted to the same course. Use is second nature; but the usage in this case is not arbitrary, but is founded on an anterior universal sense of what is proper and right; a few and only a few regarded it as comely for a man to wear his hair long. Aristotle tells us, indeed, that among the Lacedemonians, freemen wore their hair long. In the time of Homer also, the Greeks were called by him, longhaired Greeks; and some of the Asiatic nations adopted the same custom. But the general habit among men has been different. Among the Hebrews, it was regarded as disgraceful to a man to wear his hair long, except he had a vow as a Nazarite (Numbers chap. vi., v. 1 to 5; Judges chap. xiii., v. 5; chap. xvi., v. 17; 1 Samuel chap. i., 11 v.) Occasionally, for affectation or singularity, the hair was sufferred to grow as was the case with Absolom, (2 Samuel chap xiv, 26 v. ;) but the traditional law of the Jews on the subject was strict. The same rule existed among the Greeks; and it was regarded as disgraceful to wear long hair in the time of Elian. (Hist. lib. ix., chap. 14. Eustath on Hom., II. v.) It is doing that which almost universal custom has said, appropriately, belongs to the female sex. Irby and Mangles, writing of Syria, state," that about the country |