’Twas to stand fast As long as monarchy should last; But when the state should hap to reel ’Twas to submit to fatal steel. These vow-beards were also worn by some staunch old Jacobites, to mark their love for the house of Stuart, who hoped to see the king recalled to the throne. The beard of Sir Hudibras has acquired a sort of historical importance, and, to do it justice, must be pictured at full length: “His tawny beard was th’ equal grace Both of his wisdom and his face; In cut and die so like a tile, A sudden view it would beguile; The upper part whereof was whey, The nether orange mix’d 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. Like Samson’s heart-breakers it grew, In time to make a nation rue; Though it contributed its own fall To wait upon the public downfall.” What befel this tawny beard we learn from the same faithful narrative of the knight’s adventures: “At that an egg let fly, Hit him directly o’er the eye, And, running down his cheek, besmear’d With orange tawny slime his beard; But beard and slime being of one hue, The wound the less appear’d to view.” In this terrible plight he is visited by the widow, one of Job’s comforters, who begins her discourse with a commentary on beards, which must be our apology for inserting it here: “If he that is in battle conquer’d Have any title to his own beard, Though yours be sorely lugg’d and torn, It does your visage more adorn Than if ’twere prun’d, and starch’d, and lander’d, And cut square by the Russian standard.” Butler has left us a portrait of Philip Nye’s Thanksgiving Beard, which must not be passed by unnoticed: “This rev’rend brother, like a goat, Did wear a tail upon his throat, The fringe and tassel of a face, That gives it a becoming grace; But set in such a curious frame, As if ’twere wrought in filograin, And cut so e’en, as if’t had been Drawn with a pen upon his chin: No topiary hedge of quickset, Was e’er so neatly cut, or thick-set.”