Chapter 21

Rove not from pole to pole-the man lives here
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 Dame 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 martial and swaggering curl, or
downward into the drooping form which became mustaches of civil
policy; besides also occasionally letting blood, either by cupping or
by the lancet, extracting a stump, and performing other actions of
petty pharmacy, very nearly as well as his neighbour Raredrench, the
apothecary: he could, on occasion, draw a cup of beer as well as a
tooth, tap a hogshead as well as a vein, and wash, with a draught 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 garnished. In the window were
seen rows of teeth displayed upon strings like rosaries--cups with a
red rag at the bottom, to resemble blood, an intimation that patients
might be bled, cupped, or blistered, with the assistance of
"sufficient advice;" while the more profitable, but less honourable
operations upon the hair of the head and beard, were briefly and
gravely announced. Within was the well-worn leather chair for
customers, the guitar, then called a ghittern or cittern, with which a
customer might amuse himself till his predecessor was dismissed from
under Benjamin's hands, and which, therefore, often flayed the ears of
the patient metaphorically, while his chin sustained from the razor
literal scarification. All, therefore, in this department, spoke the
chirurgeon-barber, or the barber-chirurgeon.

But there was a little back-room, used as a private tap-room, which
had a separate entrance by a dark and crooked alley, which
communicated with Fleet Street, after a circuitous passage through
several by-lanes and courts. This retired temple of Bacchus had also a
connexion with Benjamin's more public shop by a long and narrow
entrance, conducting to the secret premises in which a few old topers
used to take their morning draught, and a few gill-sippers their
modicum of strong waters, in a bashful way, after having entered the
barber's shop under pretence of being shaved. Besides, this obscure
tap-room gave a separate admission to the apartments of