Charles the Fifth of Spain ascending the throne while yet a mere boy, his courtiers shaved their beards in compliment to the king's smooth face. But some of the shaven Dons were wont to say bitterly, "Since we have lost our beards, we have lost our souls!" Sully, the eminent statesman and soldier, scorned, however, to follow the fashion, and, being one day summoned to Court on urgent business of State, his beard was made the subject of ridicule by the foppish courtiers. The veteran thus gravely addressed the king: "Sire, when your father, of glorious memory, did me the honour to consult me in grave State matters, he first dismissed the buffoons and stage-dancers from the presence-chamber." It may be readily supposed that after this well-merited rebuke the grinning courtiers at once disappeared. Julius II, one of the most warlike of all the Roman Pontiffs, was the first Pope who permitted his beard to grow, to inspire the faithful with still greater respect for his august person. Kings and their courtiers were not slow to follow the example of the Head of the Church and the ruler of kings, and the fashion soon spread among people of all ranks. So highly prized was the beard in former times that Baldwin, Prince of Edessa, as Nicephorus relates in his Chronicle, pawned his beard for a large sum of money, which was redeemed by his father Gabriel, Prince of Melitene, to prevent the ignominy which his son must have suffered by its loss. And when Juan de Castro, the Portuguese admiral, borrowed a thousand pistoles from the citizens of Goa he pledged one of his whiskers, saying, "All the gold in the world cannot equal this natural ornament of my valour." And it is said the people of Goa were so much affected by the noble message that they remitted the money and returned the whisker--though of what earthly use it could prove to the gallant admiral, unless, perhaps, to stuff a tennis ball, it is not easy to say. To deprive a man of his beard was a token of ignominious subjection, and is still a common mode of punishment in some Asiatic countries. And such was the treatment that the conjuror Pinch received at the hands of Antipholus of Ephesus and his man, in the _Comedy of Errors_, according to the servant's account of the outrage, who states that not only had they "beaten the maids a-row," but they bound the doctor, Whose beard they have singed off with brands of fire; And ever as it blazed they threw on him Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair (v, 1). In Persia and India when a wife is found to have been unfaithful, her hair--the distinguishing ornament of woman, as the beard is considered to be that of man--is shaved off, among other indignities.