The Philosophy of Beards: A Lecture Physiological, Artistic & HistoricalGowing, Thomas S.
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Beards: A Lecture Physiological, Artistic & Historical
Gowing, Thomas S.
Beards
Which holy vow he firmly kept,
And most devoutly wore
A grizzly meteor on his face,
’Till they were both no more.”[35]
Footnote 35:
Taylor, the Water Poet, who lived from the end of Elizabeth to nearly
the end of the Commonwealth, thus humorously describes the various
fashions of this appendage.
“Now a few lines to paper I will put,
Of men’s Beards strange and variable cut,
In which there’s some that take as vain a pride,
As almost in all other things beside:
Some are reaped most substantial like a brush,
Which makes a natural wit known by the bush;
And in my time of some men I have heard,
Whose wisdom hath been only wealth and Beard:
Many of these the proverb well doth fit,
Which says _bush_ natural more hair than wit:
Some seem as they were starched stiff and fine,
Like to the bristles of some angry swine;
And some, to set their loves’ desire on edge,
Are cut and prun’d like to a quickset hedge.
Some like a spade, some like a fork, some square,
Some round, some mow’d like stubble, some stark bare,
Some sharp, stiletto-fashion,[36] dagger-like,
That may, with whispering, a man’s eyes outpike.
Some with the hammer cut or Roman T,
Their Beards extravagant reform’d must be;
Some with the quadrate, some triangle-fashion,
Some circular, some oval in translation;
Some perpendicular in longitude,
Some like a thicket for their crassitude.
The heighths, depths, breadths, triform, square, oval, round,
And rules geometrical in Beards are found.”
Footnote 36:
“The stiletto Beard
It makes me afeard
It is so sharp beneath:
For he that doth wear
A dagger in his face,
What must he wear in his sheath.”
_Old Author._
“Who make sharp Beards and little breeches Deities.”
_Beaumont and Fletcher._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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