Queen Mary of England, in the year 1555, sent to Moscow four accredited agents, who were all bearded; but one of them, George Killingworth, was particularly distinguished by a beard five feet two inches long, at the sight of which, it is said, a smile crossed the grim features of Ivan the Terrible himself; and no wonder. But the longest beard known out of fairy tales was that of Johann Mayo, the German painter, commonly called "John the Bearded." His beard actually trailed on the ground when he stood upright, and for convenience he usually kept it tucked in his girdle. The emperor Charles V, it is said, was often pleased to cause Mayo to unfasten his beard and allow it to blow in the faces of his courtiers.--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. 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: