FEW who love Don Quixote, will deem any notice on the Peninsular surgeon complete in which the barber is not mentioned, even be it in a postscript. Although the names of both these learned professors have long been nearly synonymous in Spain, the barber is much to be preferred, inasmuch as his cuts are less dangerous, and his conversation is more agreeable. He with the curate formed the quiet society of the Knight of La Mancha, as the apothecary and vicar used to make that of most of our country squires of England. Let, therefore, every Adonis of France, now bearded as a pard although young, nay, let each and all of our fair readers, albeit equally exempt from the pains and penalties of daily shaving, make instantly, on reaching sunny Seville, a pilgrimage to the shrine of San Figaro. His shop—apocryphal it is to be feared as other legendary localities—lies near the cathedral, and is a no less established lion than the house of Dulcinea is at Toboso, or the prison tower of Gil Blas is at Segovia. Such is the magic power of genius. Cervantes and Le Sage have given form, fixture, and local habitation to the airy nothings of their fancy’s creations, while Mozart and Rossini, by filling the world with melody, have bidden the banks of the Guadalquivir re-echo to their sweet inventions.

To those even who have no music in their souls, the movement from doctors to barbers is harmonious in a land where beards were long honoured as the type of valour and chivalry, and where shaving took the precedence of surgery; and even to this day, la tienda de barbero, the shop of the man of the razor, is better supplied than many a Spanish hospital both with patients and cutting instruments. One word first on the black whiskers of tawny Spain. These patillas, as they are now termed, must be distinguished from the ancient mustachio, the mostacho, a very classical but almost obsolete word, which the scholars of Salamanca have derived from ?st??, the upper lip. Their present and usual name is Bigote, which is also of foreign etymology, being the Spanish corruption of the German oath bey gott, and formed under the following circumstances: for nicknames, which stick like burrs, often survive the history of their origin. The free-riding followers of Charles V., who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood, swore like troopers, and gave themselves infinite airs, to the more infinite disgust of their Spanish comrades, who have a tolerable good opinion of themselves, and a first-rate hatred of all their foreign allies. These strange mustachios caught their eyes, as the stranger sounds which proceeded from beneath them did their ears. Having a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a most Oriental and schoolboy knack at a nickname, they thereupon gave the sound to the substance, and called the redoubtable garnish of hair, bigotes. This process in the formation of phrases is familiar to philologists, who know that an essential part often is taken for the whole. For example, a hat, in common Spanish parlance, is equivalent to a grandee, as with us the woolsack is to a Lord Chancellor. It is natural that unscholastic soldiers, when dealing with languages which they do not understand, should fix on their enemies, as a term of reproach, those words which, from hearing used the most often, they imagine must constitute the foundation of the hostile grammar. Thus our troops called the Spaniards los Carajos, from their terrible oaths and terrible runnings away. So the clever French designated as les godams, those “stupid” fellows in red jackets who never could be made to know when they were beaten, but continued to make use of that significant phrase in reference to their victors, until they politely showed them the shortest way home over the Pyrenees.

The real Spanish mustachio, as worn by the real Don Whiskerandoses, men with shorter cloaks and purses than beards and rapiers, have long been cut off, like the pig-tails of our monarchs and cabinet ministers. Yet their merits are embalmed in metaphors more enduring than that masterpiece in bronze with which Mr. Wyatt, full of Phidias, has adorned King George’s back and Charing Cross. Thus hombre de mucho bigote, a man of much moustache, means, in Spanish, a personage of considerable pretension, a fine, liberal fellow, and anything, in short, but a bigot in wine, women, or theology. The Spanish original realities, like the pig-tails of Great Britain, have also been immortalised by fine art, and inimitably painted by Velazquez. Under his life-conferring brush they required no twisting with hot irons. Curling from very ire and martial instinct, they were called bigotes Á la Fernandina, and their rapid growth was attributed to the eternal cannon smoke of the enemy, into which nothing could prevent their valorous wearers from poking their faces. This luxuriance has diminished in these degenerate times, unless Napier’s ‘History of the Peninsular War’ be, as the Spaniards say, written in a spirit of envy and jealousy against their heroic armies, which alone trampled on the invincible eagles of Austerlitz.

As among the Egyptian gods and priests, rank was indicated by the cut of the beard, so in Spain the military civil and clerical shapes were carefully defined. The Charley, or Imperial, as we term the little tuft in the middle of the under lip, a word by the way which is derivable either from our Charles or from his namesake emperor, was called in Spain El perrillo, “the little dog,” the terminating tail being omitted, which however becoming in the animal and bronzes, shocked Castilian euphuism.

In the mediÆval periods of Spain’s greatness the beard and not the whisker was the real thing; and as among the Orientals and ancients, it was at once the mark of wisdom and of soldiership; to cut it off was an insult and injury scarcely less than decapitation; nay, this nicety of honour survived the grave. The seated corpse of the Cid, so tells his history, knocked down a Jew who ventured to take the dead lion by his beard, which, as all natural philosophers know, has an independent vitality, and grows whether its master be alive or dead, be willing or unwilling. When the insolent Gauls pulled these flowing ornaments of the aged Roman senators, they, who with unmoved dignity had seen Marshal Brennus steal their plate and pictures, could not brook that last and greatest outrage. In process of time and fashion the beards of Spain fell off, and being only worn by mendicant monks and he-goats, were considered ungentlemanlike, and were substituted among cavaliers by the Italian mostachio; the seat of Spanish honour was then placed under the nose, that sensitive sentinel. The renowned Duke of Alva being of course in want of money, once offered one of his bigotes as a pledge for a loan, and one only was considered to be a sufficient security by the Rothschilds of the day, who remembered the hair-breadth escape of their ancestor too well to laugh at anything connected with a hero’s beard; nous avons changÉ tout cela. The united Hebrews of Paris and London would not now advance a stiver for every particular hair on the bodies of Narvaez and Espartero, not even if the moustache reglÉmentaire of Montpensier, and a bushel of Bourbon beards, warranted legitimate, were added.

The use of the bigote in Spain is legally confined to the military, most of whose generals—their name is legion—are tenderly chary of their Charlies, dreading razors no less than swords; when the Infante Don Carlos escaped from England, the only real difficulty was in getting him to cut off his moustache; he would almost sooner have lost his head, like his royal English tocayo or omonyme. Elizabeth’s gallant Drake, when he burnt Philip’s fleet at Cadiz, simply called his Nelsonic touch “singeing the King of Spain’s whiskers.” Zurbano the other day thought it punishment enough for any Basque traitors to cut off their bigotes, and turn them loose, like rats without tails, pour encourager les autres. It is indeed a privation. Thus Majaval, the pirate murderer, who by the glorious uncertainty of English law was not hanged at Exeter, offered his prison beard, when he reached Barcelona, to the delivering Virgin. Many Spanish civilians and shopkeepers, in imitation of the transpyrenean Calicots, men who wear moustachios on their lips in peace, and spectacles on their noses in war, so constantly let them grow, that Ferdinand VII. fulminated a royal decree, which was to cut them off from the face of the Peninsula, as the Porte is docking his true believers. Such is the progress of young and beardless civilization. The attempt to shorten the cloaks of Madrid nearly cost Charles III. his crown, and this cropping mandate of his beloved grandson was obeyed as Spanish decrees generally are, for a month all but twenty-nine days. These decrees, like solemn treaties, charters, stock-certificates, and so forth, being mostly used to light cigars; now-a-days that the Moro-Spaniard is aping the true Parisian polish, the national countenance is somewhat put out of face, to the serious sorrow and disparagement of poor Figaro.

As for his house and home none can fail finding it out; no cicerone is wanted, for the outside is distinguished from afar by the emblems of his time-honoured profession: first and foremost hangs a bright glittering metal Mambrino-helmet basin, with a neat semicircular opening cut out of the rim, into which the throat of the patient is let during the operation of lathering, which is always done with the hand and most copiously; near it are suspended huge grinders, which in an English museum would pass for the teeth of elephants, and for those of Saint Christopher in Spanish churches, where comparative anatomy is scouted as heretical in the matter of relics; strange to say, and no Spanish theologian could ever satisfy us why, this saint is not the “especial advocate” against the toothache; here Santa Apollonia is the soothing patroness. Near these molars are displayed awful phlebotomical symbols, and rude representations of bloodlettings; for in Spain, in church and out, painting does the work of printing to the many who can see, but cannot read. The barber’s pole, with its painted bandage riband, the support by which the arm was kept extended, is wanting to the threshold of the Figaros of Spain, very much because bleeding is generally performed in the foot, in order that the equilibrium of the whole circulation may be maintained. The painting usually presents a female foot, which being an object, and not unreasonably, of great devotion in Spain, is selected by the artist; tradition also influences the choice, for the dark sex were wont formerly to be bled regularly as calves are still, to obtain whiteness of flesh and fairness of complexion: as it was usual on each occasion that the lover should restore the exhausted patient by a present, the purses of gallants kept pace with the venous depletion of their mistresses. The Sangrados of Spain, professional as well as unprofessional, have long been addicted to the shedding of innocent blood; indeed, no people in the world are more curious about the pedigree purity of their own blood, nor less particular about pouring it out like water, whether from their own veins or those of others. One word on this vital fluid with which unhappy Spain is too often watered during her intestine disorders.

If the Iberian anatomists did not discover its circulation, the heralds have “tricked” out its blazoning, as we do our admirals, with all the nicety of armorial coloring. Blue blood, Sangre azul, is the ichor of demigods which flows in the arteries of the grandees and highest nobility, each of whose pride is to be

a boast which like some others of theirs wants confirmation, as it is in the power of one woman to taint the blood of Charlemagne; and nature, which cannot be written down by Debretts, has stamped on their countenances the marks of hybrid origin, and particularly from these very and most abhorred stocks; it is from this tint of celestial azure that the term sangre su is given in Spain to the elect and best set of earth, the haute volÉe, who soar above vulgar humanity. Red blood flows in the veins of poor gentlemen and younger brothers, and is just tolerated by all, except judicious mothers, whose daughters are marriageable. Blood, simple blood, is the puddle which paints the cheek of the plebeian and roturier; it has, or ought to possess, a perfect incompatibility with the better coloured fluid, and an oil and vinegar property of non-amalgamation. There is more difference, as Salario says, between such bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish. These and other dreams are, it is to be feared, the fond metaphors of heralds. The rosy stream in mockery of rouge croix and blue dragons flows inversely and perversely: in the arteries of the lusty muleteer it is the lava blood of health and vigour; in the monkey marquis and baboon baron it stagnates in the dull lethargy of a blue collapse. Their noble ichor is virtually more impoverished than their nominal rent-roll, since the operation of transmission of wholesome blood from young veins into a worn-out frame, which is so much practised elsewhere, is too nice for the Sangre su and Sangrados of Spain; the thin fluid is never enriched with the calipash heiress of an alderman, nor is the decayed genealogical stock renewed by the golden graft of a banker’s only daughter. The insignificant grandees of Spain quietly permitted Christina to barter away their country’s liberties; but when her children by the base-born MuÑoz came betwixt them and their nobility, then alone did they remonstrate. Indifferent to the degradation of the throne, they were tremblingly alive to the punctilios of their own order. Those Peninsular ladies who are blues, by blood not socks, are equally fastidious in the serious matter of its admixture even by Hymen: one of them, it is said, having chanced in a moment of weakness to mingle her azure with something brownish, alleged in excuse that she had done so for her character’s sake. “Que disparate, mi SeÑora.” “What nonsense, my lady!” was her fair confidante’s reply; “ten bastards would have less discoloured your blood, than one legitimate child the issue of such a misalliance.”

To stick, however, to our colours; black blood is the vile Stygean pitch which is found in the carcasses of Jews, Gentiles, Moors, Lutherans, and other combustible heretics, with whose bodies the holy tribunal made bonfires for the good of their souls. Nay, in the case of the Hebrew this black blood is also thought to stink, whence Jews were called by learned Latinists putos, quia putant; and certainly at Gibraltar an unsavoury odour seems to be gentilitious in the children of Israel, not however to unorthodox and unheraldic nostrils a jot more so, than in the believing Spanish monk. Recently the colour black has been assigned to the blood of political opponents, and a copious “shedding of vile black blood” has been the regular panacea of every military Sangrado. How extremes meet! Thus, this aristocracy of colour, in despotical old Spain, which lies in the veins, is placed on the skin in new republican America. Where is the free and easy Yankee would recognise a brother, in a black?

To return to Figaro. There is no mistaking his shop; for independently of the external manifestations of the fine arts practised within, his threshold is the lounge of all idlers, as well as of those who are anxious to relieve their chins of the thick stubble of a three days’ growth. The house of the barber has, since the days of Solomon and Horace, been the mart of news and gossip,—of epigram and satire, as Pasquino the tailor’s was at Rome. It is the club of the lower orders, who here take up a position, and listen, cloaked as Romans, to some reader of the official Gazette, which, with a cigar, indicates modern civilization, and soothes him with empty vapour. Here, again, is the mint of scandal, and all who have lived intimately with Spaniards, know how invariably every one stabs his neighbour behind his back with words, the lower orders occasionally using knives sharper even than their tongues. Here, again, resort gamblers, who, seated on the ground with cards more begrimed than the earth, pursue their fierce game as eager as if existence was at stake; for there is generally some well-known cock of the walk, a bully, or guapo, who will come up and lay his hand on the cards, and say, “No one shall play with any cards but with mine”—aqui no se juega sino con mis barajas. If the parties are cowed, they give him a halfpenny each. If, however, one of the challenged be a spirited fellow, he defies him—AquÍ no se cobra el barato sino con un puÑal de Albacete—“You get no change here except out of an Albacete knife.” If the defiance be accepted, Vamos alla is the answer—“Let’s go to it.” There’s an end then of the cards, all flock to the more interesting ÉcartÉ; instances have occurred, where Greek meets Greek, of their tying the two advanced feet together, and yet remaining fencing with knife and cloak for a quarter of an hour before the blow be dealt. The knife is held firmly, the thumb is pressed straight on the blade, and calculated either for the cut or thrust.

The term Barato strictly means the present which is given to waiters who bring a new pack of cards. The origin is Arabic, Baara, “a voluntary gift;” in the corruption of the Baratero, it has become an involuntary one. Our legal term Barratry is derived from the mediÆval Barrateria, which signified cheating or foul play. Cervantes well knew that Baratar in old Spanish meant to exchange unfairly, to thimble-rig, to sell anything under its real value, and therefore gave the name of Barrateria to Sancho’s sham government. The Baratero is quite a thing of Spain, where personal prowess is cherished, and there is one in every regiment, ship, prison, and even among galley-slaves.

The interior of the barber’s shop is equally a cosa de EspaÑa. Her neighbour may boast to lead Europe in hair-dressing and clipping poodles, but Figaro snaps his fingers at her civilization, and no cat’s ears and tail can be closer shaved than his one’s are. The walls of his operating room are neatly lathered with white-wash; on a peg hangs his brown cloak and conical hat; his shelves are decorated with clay-painted figures of picturesque rascals, arrayed in all their Andalucian toggery—bandits, bull-fighters, and smugglers, who, especially the latter, are more universally popular than all or any long-tail-coated chancellors of exchequers. The walls are enlivened with rude prints of fandango dancings, miracles, and bull-fights, in which the Spanish vulgar delight, as ours do in racing and ring notabilities. Nor is a portrait of his querida, his black-eyed sweetheart, often wanting. Near these, for religion mixes itself with everything of Spain, are images of the Virgin, patron saints, with stoups for holy water, and little cups in which lighted wicks burn floating on green oil; and formerly no barber prepared for an operation, whether on veins, teeth, or beards, without first making the sign of a cross. Thus hallowed, his implements of art are duly arranged in order; his glass, soap, towels, and leather strap, and guitar, which indeed, with the razor, constitutes the genus barber. “These worthies,” said Don Quixote, “are all either guitarristas o copleros; they are either makers of couplets, or accompany other songsters with catgut.” Hence Quevedo, in his ‘Pigsties of Satan,’ punishes unrighteous Figaros, by hanging up near them a guitar, which tantalizes their touch, and moves away when they wish to take it down.

Few Spaniards ever shave themselves; it is too mechanical, so they prefer, like the Orientals, a “razor that is hired,” and as that must be paid for, scarcely any go to the expensive luxury of an every-day shave. Indeed, Don Quixote advised Sancho, when nominated a governor, to shave at least every other day if he wished to look like a gentleman. The peculiar sallowness of a Spaniard’s face is heightened by the contrast of a sable bristle. Figaro himself is dressed much after the fashion in which he appears on transpyrenean stages; he, on true Galenic principles, takes care not to alarm his patients by a lugubrious costume. There is nothing black, or appertaining to the grave about him; he is all tags, tassels, colour, and embroidery, quips and quirks; he is never still; always in a bustle, he is lying and lathering, cutting chins and capers, here, there, and everywhere. Figaro la, Figaro qua. If he has a moment free from taking off beards and making paper cigars, he whips down his guitar and sings the last seguidilla; thus he drives away dull care, who hates the sound of merry music, and no wonder; the operator performs his professional duties much more skilfully than the rival surgeon, nor does he bungle at any little extraneous amateur commissions; and there are more real performances enacted by the barbers in Seville itself, than in a dozen European opera houses.

These Figaros, says their proverb, are either mad or garrulous, Barberos, o locos, o parleros. Hence, when the Andalucian autocrat, Adrian, when asked how he liked to be shaved, replied “Silently.” Humbler mortals must submit to let Figaro have his wicked way in talk; for when a man is fixed in his operating chair, with his jaws lathered, and his nose between a finger and a thumb, there is not much conversational fair play or reciprocity. The Spanish barber is said to learn to shave on the orphan’s head, and nothing, according to one described by Martial, escaped except a single wary he-goat. The experiments tried on the veins and teeth of aching humanity, are sometimes ludicrous—at others serious, as we know to our cost, having been silly enough to leave behind in Spain two of our wise teeth as relics, tokens, and trophies of Figaro’s unrelenting prowess. We cannot but remember such things were, and were dearer, than the pearls in Cleopatra’s ears, which she melted in her gazpachos. “A mouth without molars,” said Don Quixote to Sancho, “is worse than a mill without grinding-stones;” and the Don was right.