Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 2: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's HandbookBrewer, Ebenezer Cobham
General
Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 2: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook
Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham
Allusions; Fiction -- Dictionaries; Literature -- Dictionaries
She had such luxuriant hair that she could stand upright and it covered
her to her feet like a veil. She was very proud of these flaxen locks;
and a slight accident by fire having befallen them, she resolved ever
after to play in a wig. She used, therefore, to wind this immense
quantity of hair round her head, and put over it a capacious caxon, the
consequence of which was that her head bore about the same proportion to
the rest of her figure that a whale’s skull does to its body.—Philip
Astley (1742-1814).
_Hair._ Mdlle. Bois de Chêne, exhibited in London in 1852-3, had a most
profuse head of hair, and also a strong black beard, large whiskers, and
thick hair on her arms and legs.
Charles XII. had in his army a woman whose beard was a yard and a half
long. She was taken prisoner at the battle of Pultowa, and presented to
the Czar in 1724.
Johann Mayo, the German painter, had a beard which touched the ground
when he stood up.
Master George Killingworthe, in the court of Ivan “the Terrible” of
Russia, had a beard five feet two inches long. It was thick, broad, and
of a yellowish hue.—Hakluyt (1589).
=Hair Cut Off.= It was said by the Greeks and Romans that life would not
quit the body of a devoted victim till a lock of hair had first been cut
from the head of the victim and given to Proserpine. Thus, when Alcestis
was about to die as a voluntary sacrifice for the life of her husband,
Than´atos first cut off a lock of her hair for the queen of the
infernals. When Dido immolated herself, she could not die till Iris had
cut off one of her yellow locks for the same purpose.—Virgil, _Æneid_,
iv. 693-705.
Iris cut the yellow hair of unhappy Dido, and broke the charm.—O. W.
Holmes, _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_.
=Hair, Sign of Rank.=
The Parthians and ancient Persians of high rank wore long flowing hair.
Homer speaks of “the long-haired Greeks” by way of honorable
distinction. Subsequently the Athenian cavalry wore long hair, and all
Lacedæmonian soldiers did the same.
The Gauls considered long hair a notable honor, for which reason Julius
Cæsar obliged them to cut off their hair in token of submission.
The Franks and ancient Germans considered long hair a mark of noble
birth. Hence Clodion, the Frank, was called “The Long-Haired,” and his
successors are spoken of as _les rois chevelures_.
The Goths looked on long hair as a mark of honor, and short hair as a
mark of thraldom.
For many centuries long hair was in France the distinctive mark of kings
and nobles.
=Haïz´um= (_3 syl._), the horse on which the archangel Gabriel rode when
he led a squadron of 3000 angels against the Koreishites (_3 syl._) in
the famous battle of Bedr.
=Hakem´ or Hakeem=, chief of the Druses, who resides at Deir-el-Kamar.
The first hakem was the third Fatimite caliph, called B’amr-ellah, who
professed to be incarnate deity, and the last prophet who had personal
communication between God and man. He was slain on Mount Mokattam, near
Cairo (Egypt).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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