ht enjoy a handsome annuity to
which he was entitled "so long as his wife remained above ground." His
person was for many years familiar to loungers in Hyde Park, where he
appeared regularly every afternoon, riding on a little pony, and wearing
a magnificent beard of twenty years' growth, which an Oriental might
well have envied, the more remarkable in an age when shaving was so
generally practised.--A jocular epitaph was composed on "Mary Van
Butchell," of which these lines may serve as a specimen:

O fortunate and envied man!
To keep a wife beyond life's span;
Whom you can ne'er have cause to blame,
Is ever constant and the same;
Who, qualities most rare, inherits
A wife that's dumb, yet _full of spirits_.

The celebrated Dr. John Hunter is said to have embalmed the body of Van
Butchell's first wife--for the bearded empiric married again--and the
"mummy," in its original glass case, is still to be seen in the Museum
of the Royal College of Surgeon's, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, London.

It was once the fashion for gallants to dye their beards various
colours, such as yellow, red, gray, and even green. Thus in the play of
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Bottom the weaver asks in what kind of beard
he is to play the part of Pyramis--whether "in your straw-coloured
beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your
French crown-coloured beard, your perfect yellow?" (Act i, sc. 2.) In
ancient church pictures, and in the miracle plays performed in medieval
times, both Cain and Judas Iscariot were always represented with yellow
beards. In the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, Mistress Quickly asks Simple
whether his master (Slender) does not wear "a great round beard, like a
glover's paring-knife," to which he replies: "No, forsooth; he hath but
a little wee face, with a little yellow beard--a Cain-coloured beard"
(Act i, sc. 4).--Allusions to beards are of very frequent occurrence in
Shakspeare's plays, as may be seen by reference to any good Concordance,
such as that of the Cowden Clarkes.

Harrison, in his _Description of England_, ed. 1586, p. 172, thus refers
to the vagaries of fashion of beards in his time: "I will saie nothing
of our heads, which sometimes are polled, sometimes curled, or suffered
to grow at length like womans lockes, manie times cut off, above or
under the eares, round as by a woodden dish. Neither will I meddle with
our varietie of beards, of which some are shaven from the chin like