Whose razor's only equall'd by his beer;

  And where, in either sense, the cockney-put

  May, if he pleases, get confounded cut.

       On the sign of an Alehouse kept by a Barber.

We are under the necessity of transporting our readers to the habitation of Benjamin Suddlechop, the husband of the active and efficient Dame¹ Ursula, and who also, in his own person, discharged more offices than one. For, besides trimming locks and beards, and turning whiskers upward into the martial³ and swaggering curl, or downward into the drooping⁴ form which became mustaches of civil policy; besides also occasionally letting blood, either by cupping or by the lancet, extracting a stump⁵, and performing other actions of petty pharmacy⁶, very nearly as well as his neighbour Raredrench, the apothecary⁷: he could, on occasion, draw a cup of beer as well as a tooth, tap a hogshead as well as a vein⁸, and wash, with a draught⁹ of good ale, the mustaches which his art had just trimmed. But he carried on these trades apart from each other.

 

His barber's shop projected its long and mysterious pole into Fleet Street, painted party-coloured-wise, to represent the ribbons with which, in elder times, that ensign was garnished¹⁰. In the window were seen rows of teeth displayed upon strings¹¹ like rosaries—cups with a red rag at the bottom, to resemble blood, an intimation that patients might be bled, cupped, or

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