Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/329

 to any true sense of beauty, as the tattooing of the savage or the striped face of the clown. Nor should any cut of hair or beard be adopted which assimilates—as many of them do—the divine human face to that of the lower animals, making it a caricature of that of some brute.

Fashion, indeed, has at various times sanctioned many quaint and curious styles, as we may readily see by walking down some long gallery of old portraits, for instance, that at Versailles, and we might fill many pages with descriptions of the vagaries so brought to our notice. The virtuosi in such matters have delighted to arrange and classify these styles under various names, often drawn from some great man, who affected a peculiar cut. Thus, we have the Blücher moustache, long and overhanging throughout its whole length; the Gustavus Adolphus moustache, waxed and with the ends straight; the Vandyck moustache, in which a triangular piece of the upper lip just at its centre is shaved clean; the T beard, often mentioned in English writers of the seventeenth century, so called because the moustache was waxed, and worn only with a narrow goatee, giving the shape when seen in front of a capital T.

But it is not with such follies that our business lies, or we might never get through. For even as far back as 1660, an old English ballad writer exclaims:—