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.

Philip Nye, an Independent minister in the time of the Commonwealth, and
one of the famous Assembly of Divines, was remarkable for the
singularity of his beard. Hudibras, in his Heroical Epistle to the lady
of his "love," speaks of

Amorous intrigues
In towers, and curls, and periwigs,
With greater art and cunning reared
Than Philip Nye's _thanksgiving beard_.

Nye opposed Lilly the astrologer with no little virulence, for which he
was rewarded with the privilege of holding forth upon Thanksgiving Day,
and so, as Butler says, in some MS. verses,

He thought upon it and resolved to put
His beard into as wonderful a cut.

Butler even honoured Nye's beard with a whole poem, entitled "On Philip
Nye's Thanksgiving Beard," which is printed in his _Genuine Remains_,
edited by Thyer, vol. i, p. 177 ff., and opens thus:

A beard is but the vizard of the face,
That nature orders for no other place;
The fringe and tassel of a countenance
That hides his person from another man's,
And