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: