--A worthy clergyman in the time of Queen Elizabeth gave as
the best reason he had for wearing a beard of enormous length, "that no
act of his life might be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance."
Queen Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, made an abortive
attempt to abolish her subjects' beards by an impost of 3s. 4d. a year
(equivalent to four times that sum in these "dear" days) on every beard
of more than a fortnight's growth. And Peter the Great also laid a tax
upon beards in Russia: nobles' beards were assessed at a rouble, and
those of commoners at a copeck each. "But such veneration," says Giles
Fletcher, "had this people for these ensigns of gravity that many of
them carefully preserved their beards in their cabinets to be buried
with them, imagining perhaps that they should make but an odd figure in
their grave with their naked chins."
The beard of the renowned Hudibras was portentous, as we learn from
Butler, who thus describes the Knight's hirsute honours:
His tawny beard was th' equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;
In cut and dye so like a tile,
A sadden view it would beguile:
The upper part whereof was whey,
The nether orange mixt with grey.
This hairy meteor did denounce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns;
With grisly type did represent
Declining age of government,
And tell, with hieroglyphic spade,
Its own grave and the state's were made.
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