ABSTRACT
In search of a standard by which to measure the mind of a Barber with the view of estimating the merits or failings of Edmund Harrold, I have failed to find one. Nor has Mr Proctor’s recent Barber’s Shop2 supplied the want[?]. The bearers of the helmet of Mambrino3 form, indeed, a very motley, a very odd set of people; and hence[?] no satirist or depicter of character has stretched a typical barber. The hero of Beaumarchais’s comedies was too clever and unscrupulous a rogue; Mr Nibbs the operator who stood over Douglas Jerrold’s Barber’s Chair was, like Mrs Candle, too loquacious. Mr R.E. Egerton-Warburton gives the palm for excellence in the barber’s art to that country which first set up Mambrino’s helmet as a sign[?]; and in humorous verse describes how he found the pink of perfection in a barber of Seville.
