And so the beard is coming in fashion again. Consoling thought to you of the fertile facial soil and with ugly contour or ungainly blemishes to conceal, but distressing to those chubby-faced, masculine beauties whose tender skins will not yield a plentiful crop. But, you have had your day, oh, ye of the germ-proof, Napoleonic countenance; so, discard your Gillettes, and make way for his majesty—The Beard. The halcyon days of the razor are no more, if we are to believe fickle Dame Fashion, and we are now to welcome the day of the shears. If nature has been stingy, and that glorious excrescence, the beard, is impossible to you, mon cher, pray accept our sympathy; but, please be generous enough to take the inevitable with good grace, and not worry us with foolish arguments about bearded barbarians and unsanitary savages. We know that you can make a strong case against the beard, but we imagine we can make one equally strong in its favor. All of your progenitors had them, including Adam—if we are to believe the ancient monuments, all of which show those gentlemen with a bushy beard of no mean dimensions. You say the ancient Egyptians wore no beards? Yes, but please observe that on occasions of high festivity, they wore false beards as assertions of their dignity and virility, and always represented their male deities with splendid hirsute adornments tip-tilted at the ends. It is true that they called the Greeks and Romans "barbarians" (bearded, unshaven, savages), and that about 300 B. C., the latter began to shave and in turn to call other peoples "barbarians"; but these incidents were only passing fancies, freaks and fashions soon to make way for the approaching, persistent reign of the beard. You say that Julian argued arduously against the beard? Yes, but would you take for a model a man whose whole body was bearded, and who prided himself on his long finger-nails and on the inky blackness of his hands? And don't forget that the reason Alexander abolished beards in his army was one that hardly fits your case, for was it not because the enemy had a habit of using the beard as a handle, much to the inconvenience—to say nothing of the discomfort—of the victim?

The beard has had an eventful career, and has always been the bone of contention between nations, churches, politicians, kings, gods, and barbers. As to the last, suffice it to say that beards existed before barbers, and that barbers are now as favorable to beards as they are unfavorable to safety razors. As for the churches, they have been alternately pro and con: Israel brought the beard safely out of Egyptian bondage; the Orientals cherished it as a sacred thing; the Scriptures abound with examples of how it was used to interpret pride, joy, sorrow, despondency, etc., the Greek church was for beards, and the Roman church against; the Popes of Naples wore beards at various periods; and now, most of our popes, priests and preachers keep their "chins new reaped." In Asia, wars have been declared on alleged grievances concerning shaving, and Nero offered some of the hairs of his beard to Jupiter Capitolinus who could well have bearded a dozen emperors from his own. Herodotus has more to say of beards than of belles, bibles and Belzebub, and the other poets and historians have found inspiration in like theme. In some times, beards denoted noble birth and in others they were tokens of depravity or of ostracism. The Roskolniki, a sect of schismatics, maintained that the divine image resided in the beard, and for ages the beard was the outward sign of a true man. In brief, the beard has had a Titanic struggle for existence, first up, then down, first on and then off. Just as it would attain the zenith of its glory, some beardless king would come along and dethrone it, as was the case in Spain, for example, when Philip V's tender chin refused to bear fruit, which calamity soon changed the fashion among the Spanish nobility. And, no sooner would the bald chin be established in favor, than some ugly-faced prince would come forward with an edict that the elect must again display the manly beard, as in France, when the young king's face was so disfigured with scars that he found a beard necessary to give him an appearance of respectability, whereupon all his faithful subjects found that they also had scars to conceal, much to the dismay of the barbers.

Then, again, the beard was often attacked by the assessors, as well as by the churches and fashions; for did not Peter the Great levy a heavy tax on all Russian beards, and did not Queen Elizabeth, in spite of bearded Raleigh, impose a tax of 3s. 4d. on all beards above a fortnight's growth? These were unfair handicaps to the beard, and greatly hampered its progress, but, beards, like truth, crushed to earth will rise again, and so always did the beard. For, observe that in the reign of Henry VIII the lawyers wore imposing beards, which became so fashionable that the authorities at Lincoln's Inn made them pay double common to sit at the great table; but mark that this was before 1535 when Henry raised his own crisp beard which afterwards became so celebrated. Beginning with the 13th century, when beards first came in fashion in England, up to the present, the poor beard has had a checkered career, but of late it has held its own with commendable persistency, and now all Europe is bearded, as it was in the beginning.

If the beard was sometimes held in respect, as in the Bastile, where an official was kept busy shaving the captives, and as in our own prisons, where the guests of the state are kept beardless, do you say that occasionally it was held in contempt and betokens laziness and rudeness? Yes, but, when your entire list of digressions is exposed, and your whole catalog of objections exhausted, you will find that His Majesty the Beard still waves triumphantly. It may be trod under foot for a time, but, just as the shaven beard will soon grow again, so will the beard that has been legislated against by court, church or fashion. In days of old, to touch the beard rudely was to assail the dignity of its owner; and when a man placed his hand upon his beard and swore by it, he felt bounden by the most sacred of oaths. We all have a certain reverence for traditions, and those of the beard are still respected, among the uncivilized as well as among the civilized. Was it not Juan de Castro, the Portuguese admiral, who borrowed a thousand pistoles and pledged one of his whiskers, saying, "All the gold in the world cannot equal this natural ornament of my valor?" Persius associated wisdom with the beard, and called Socrates "Magister Barbatus" in commendation of that gentleman's populous beard. And do not the sculptors and painters usually represent Jupiter, Hercules and Plato with the same tokens of strength, fortitude, sturdiness and virility? Who would favor a "beardless youth" to Numa Pimpolius—he of the magnificent flowing beard? Who would prefer a Shakespeare, a Longfellow, a Whitman, a Ruskin, a Charlemagne, shorn of their hirsute adornments? Or a Lincoln, Grant or Lee? But, of course, there are beards and beards; we are not lost in admiration at sight of such anomalies as those of John Mayo ("John the Bearded"), or of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, nor even with that majestic forest of hair which was attached to Queen Mary's agent to Moscow, George Killingworth, whose beard measured five feet two inches, and which so pleased the grim Ivan the Terrible that he actually laughed and played with it. Coming down to the present, some of us will prefer the silky, golden beard, such as adorns the handsome countenance of Judge Wilkin, of the Children's Court; some the splendid snow-white beard of Hudson Maxim, or the shorter and less white beard of our able and amiable Edwin Markham; or the mixed, philosophic beard of General Vanderbilt; or, perchance, we prefer the sandy, semi-gray beard of that profound jurist, statesman, philosopher,—Judge Gaynor. And then there is the erudite Bernard Shaw, and our virtuous statesman Judge Hughes, and then there was the sage and honorable keeper of the public baths, Dr. Wm. H. Hale, and Oscar Hammerstein, the impressario. Yes, the beard is coming, so away with your safety razors, and supply your barber with shears. Away with your alum, salves and powders, and look up the old recipes for hair-restoring. The Roman youths used household oils to coax the hairs to grow, but the apothecaries of those days were not so cunning as ours, and soon we may expect to see the bill-boards and advertising pages filled with notices of new preparations guaranteed to grow a beard in a night, and directions how to care for, dress, comb, clip and preserve it. No doubt we shall soon become as careful of those sacred emblems of maturity and manhood, our whiskers, as Sir Thomas Moore was of his, who, as he put his head upon the block, carefully laid his beard out of the way, and then cracked a joke. What kind of a beard shall we wear? Consult the artists and barbers, and trim it as you do your hair—as best suits and becomes you. Charles the First adopted the Vandyke beard, after the artist of that name. Ruskin, and other philosophers, wore their beards as nature intended, trimming them about once every decade. Actors, waiters, and doctors will probably wear no beards, for obvious reasons, but they will all wish they could, if they read James Ward's "Defense of the Beard," in which eighteen excellent reasons are given, among which might be mentioned, protection to throat and chest, and Nature. And yet, on the other hand, there are serious objections to the beard, among which is the one made immortal by those classic lines of Homer—or was it Lewis Carroll?—which runneth thus:

There has been some scientific inquiry as to why woman was made beardless, but the question was never satisfactorily settled until the poets became interested in the problem, and the result was as follows: