The idea that shaving is a duty—­ceremonial, as among the Egyptian priests, or social merely, as among ourselves—­is older than the invention of steel or even of bronze razors.  Nothing is more remarkable in savage life than the resolution of the braves who shave with a shell or with a broken piece of glass, left by European mariners.  A warrior will throw himself upon the ground, and while one friend sits on his head, and another holds his arms and prevents him from struggling, a third will scrape his chin with the shell or the broken bottle-glass till he rises, bleeding, but beardless.  Macaulay, it seems, must have shaved almost as badly with the razor of modern life.  When he went to a barber, and, after an easy shave, asked what he owed, the fellow replied, “Just what you generally give the man who shaves you, sir.”  “I generally give him two cuts on each cheek,” said the historian of England.  Shaving requires a combination of qualities which rarely meet in one amateur.  You should have plenty of razors, unlike a Prussian ambassador of the stingy Frederick.  This ambassador, according to Voltaire, cut his throat with the only razor he possessed.  The chin of that diplomatist must have been unworthy alike of the Court to which he was accredited, and of that from which he came.  The exquisite shaver who would face the world with a smooth chin requires many razors, many strops, many brushes, odd soaps, a light steady hand, and, perhaps, a certain gaiety of temper which prevents edged weapons from offering unholy temptations.  Possibly the shaver is born, not made, like the poet; it is sure that many men are born with an inability to shave.  Hence comes the need for the kindly race of barbers, a race dear to literature.  Their shops were the earliest clubs, their conversation was all the ancient world knew in the way of society journals.  Horace, George Eliot, Beaumarchais, Cervantes, and Scott have appreciated the barber, and celebrated his characteristics.  If the wearing of the beard ever became universal, the world, and especially the Spanish and Italian world, would sadly miss the barber and the barber’s shop.  The energy of the British character, our zeal for individual enterprise, makes us a self-shaving race; the Latin peoples are economical, but they do not grudge paying for an easy shave.  Americans in this matter are more Continental than English in their taste.  Was it not in Marseilles that his friends induced Mark Twain to be shaved by a barber worthy of the bottle-glass or sea-shell stage of his profession?  They pretended that his performances were equal to those of the barber on board the ship that brought them from America.