When the lively Beatrice exclaims, “I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face,” and is reminded she may light on one without, the alternative seems by no means pleasing; for she replies, “What shall I do with him? dress him with my apparel, and make him my waiting gentleman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath none is less than a man.” And we take it, though the lady tells us she was born to speak “all mirth, no matter” she has given expression to the opinion of her own sex very naively. It was one of those consistent contradictions so in character with the delightful absurdities of lovers, for some sighing swains to part with “the old ornament of their cheeks;” some say, to give a more youthful appearance to those who stood in need of it; and adopted by others from the merciful consideration which swayed the heart of Bottom, when he resolved “to roar like a sucking dove,” not to “fright the ladies.” When the repentant Benedick turned lover, his beard was fated to stuff tennis-balls. To pluck a hair from the beard of the great Cham, at the bidding of some fair inamorata, was obviously an easy and agreeable duty to the knights of old romance. But what shall we say to those giants’ coats
“Made from the beards of kings.”
Once upon a time, by the exigencies of war, John de Castro was compelled to leave one of his whiskers in pledge with the inhabitants of Goa, as security for a thousand pistoles, which he needed to carry on the siege. A general’s whiskers valued at 2,000 pistoles! Everything, in short, has its use,
A barbe de fol apprend-on à raire.
In Elizabeth’s reign periwigs made their appearance, and were worn very generally by ladies of rank. Paul Hentzner, writing of the queen, then in her sixty-seventh year, says she wore false hair, and that red, with a small crown on her head. False hair of different colours was worn on different occasions by the same person: sometimes the queen appeared in black hair.
Mary Queen of Scots had black hair; but in some of her portraits she is represented with light hair, and, in accordance with the fashion of her day, she frequently wore borrowed locks of different colours. Knollys, in a letter to Cecil, makes mention of one “Mistress Mary Seaton, greatly praised by the queen, and one of the finest buskers to be seen in any country. Among other pretty devices, she did set a curled hair upon the queen that was said to be a perewyke, that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of head-dressing without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gayly well.” Hair-powder first came into fashion in 1590.
Puttenham, in his “Art of Poesie,” says, “Now again at this time the young gentlemen of the court have taken up the long haire trayling on their shoulders, and think this more decent, for what respect I should be glad to know.” Curling the points of their beards and moustaches was a favourite style with the young men of fashion. The ladies wore the hair curled, frizzled, and crisped, and underpropped with pins and wires, and so tortured into the most fantastic shapes: we read, also, of cauls of hair set with seed-pearls and gold buttons.
In the days of our British Solomon there were first-rate coxcombs and exquisites; and some so solicitous about the beauty of the outward man, that, when they walked abroad, they carried a looking-glass “in a tobacco box or dial set.” Towards the close of this reign, the hair of females was combed back in a roll over the forehead, and on this a small hood.
In France, when Louis XIII. came to the throne, he was too young to have a beard. For a time the beard was unfashionable; but whiskers were much in favour with gallants, and thought to be greatly admired by their lady-loves.
The peaked beard of Charles I., so well known from the portraits by Vandyke, introduces us to the troubled times of the Cavaliers and Roundheads. The aversion of the latter to the flowing curls of the Royalists was extreme, and led to the adoption of the Puritanical crop, which, as a mere negation and opposed to every principle of beauty, was doomed in turn to be discarded with ineffable contempt. One would wish to speak with all respect of the stout ironsides who fought at Marston Moor and Naseby; but the silly crusade, encouraged by some of the meaner sort against the beautiful creations of art, has done more to estrange men’s minds from the noble principles they upheld with their swords, than the united acclaim of their preachers could effect in their behalf. The “love-locks” of the court gallants were especially hateful to the Puritans. Sometimes a single lock of hair, tied at the end with silk ribbon in bows, was allowed to fall on the chest; others wore two such love-locks, one on each side of the head, which, at times, reached to the waist. Prynne wrote a book expressly against them, on “The Unloveliness of Love-locks;” and in 1643 appeared Dr. Hall’s tract “On the Loathsomeness of Long Hair,” wherein he complained that “some have long lockes at their eares, as if they had four eares, or were prick-eared; some have a little long locke onely before, hanging down to their noses, like the taile of a weasall; every man being made a foole at the barber’s pleasure, or making a foole of the barber for having to make him such a foole.” And in Lyly’s play of Midas, it is asked, “Will you have a low curl on your head, like a ball, or dangling locks, like a spaniel? Your moustachioes sharp at the ends, like a shoemaker’s awl, or hanging down to your mouth, like goats’ flakes? Your love-locks wreathed with a silken twist, or shaggy to fall on your shoulders?”