CULTIVATIONS. ALL men are not agriculturists, horticulturists, or arboriculturists; but yet almost all men are cultivators By this it is meant that men in general cultivate, or coax, or unduly appreciate and fondle, some particular feature of their persons, or else, perhaps, some integument connected with their persons, to such a degree as to be rather conspicuous, while to every thing else they only give the ordinary degree of attention. There are many features of human nature which remain to be detected and described; and this is one→→→ Cultivations. So far as I am aware, no one ever thought of pointing it out to mankind; the subject of cultivations has hitherto remained totally uncultivated. So it shall be no longer. Hair, as the only part of the person which actually grows like a vegetable, is naturally a large subject of cultivation. The Cavaliers long ago cultivated love locks, which they kept hanging down in graceful fashion from their temples. These locks, or curls, are now changed for tufts or bunches of hair, which the young men cultivate at the same place, and are ever shaking up and tedding, exactly as if it were a crop of hay instead of hair. Mark a modern beau as he walks along the street, and you will observe at one glance that the principal part of the man—the heart— the sensorium-the cynosure-the point from which all the rest evolves-the root of the man, in short, is the tuft under the right rim of his hat. All the rest of him is a mere pendulum, vibrating from this axis. As he walks along, he hardly feels that any other part of him is in existence, besides that. But he feels his tuft most intensely. Thought, feeling, every thing, lies concentrated in that; head, body, and limbs, are all alike mere members devolved from it. If you were to cut off the side-bunch of a modern beau in his sleep, he would, for the time, be utterly ruined. It would be like the polypus, deprived of every thing but a single leg; and he would require several months of dormant existence—that is, retirement from the streets-to let the better part of him grow out again from the worse, which had remained behind. Let not the demure Puritan, however, think that the joke lies all against the gay cavalier or beau. There may be as much of the sin of cultivation in the stroked and glossy hair of the Roundhead or plain man, as in the love-locks and bunches of their antipodes in sentiment. I have seen some men, who affected to be very unaffected, cultivate a peak on the top and centre of their brows as sedulously, and with as much inward gratulation on account of it, as ever I saw a dandy cultivate a tuft, or train a side-curl. It must be understood that there are cultivations of a negative character, as well as of a positive, and he who is guiltless of cultivation in his heart is alone guiltless. Next to curls stand whiskers! The whisker is a bounty of nature, which man does not like to refuse taking advantage of. The thing presses upon him-it is there; and to put it altogether aside, except upon the demand of temporary fashion, is scarcely to be thought of. Some men, however, are more able to resist the demon of whiskers than others. There are some men so prone to the temptations of this fiend, that they enlarge and enlarge their field of cultivation, by small and imperceptible degrees, till at length the whole chin falls a prey, excepting perhaps a small bit about the mouth, just enough to preserve the cultivator within the |