Things to keep in mind:
The secret of beards.
In England today the fashion of shaving is so nearly universal that you may go about for months and years without seeing a natural beard. Between the native beauty of a great beard that never was touched by razor (here I stroked my hand down the soft Assyrian blackness of my own) and the harsh stiff trimmed beards, and these as a rule, too, old men’s beards, of today, there is as much difference as between the stately elm and its poor limb-lopped brothers in Kensington Gardens. So that the beard has become, from the chief ornament of manhood, the badge of a doddering age grown too idle to use the razor; and that “bloom of youth,” the soft young growth of the beard on a young man’s cheek that the Greeks so much delighted in, is, in this country, as extinct as the osprey or the bustard.
—posted 3168 days ago
