It shall, and teach you manners; I have yet
No ague, I can look upon your buff,
And punto beard, and call for no strong waters."
"It is difficult to ascertain," says Repton, "when the custom of pulling the nose superseded that of pulling the beard, but most probably when the chin became naked and close shaven, affording no longer a handle for insult." In the reign of James II., William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, paid £30,000 for offering this insult to a person at Court. An earlier instance of pulling the nose may be found in Ben Jonson's Epicæne, or the Silent Woman, Act iv. sc. 5.
In "Aubrey's Letters" is an allusion to wiping the beard. "Ralph Kettle, D.D.," we read, "preached in St Mary's Church at Oxford, and, in conclusion of a sermon, said, 'But now I see it is time for me to shutt up my booke, for I see the doctors' men come in wiping their beards from the ale-house' (he could from the pulpit plainly see them, and 't was their custome to go there, and, about the end of the Sermon, to return to wayte on their masters)." An old play by Lyly, entitled Mother Bombie (1597-98), Act i. sc. 3, contains the following passage:—
"Tush, spit not you, and I'll warrant I, my beard is as good as a handkerchief."
Our quotations from old plays are mainly drawn from Repton's little book, "Some account of the Beard and Moustachio," of which one hundred copies were printed for private circulation in 1839.
The extracts which we have reproduced are not such as to cause the beard to find favour with the ladies. In Marston's Antonio and Melida, (1602), Act v., we read as follows:—
"Piero.—Faith, mad niece, I wonder when thou wilt marry?
"Rossaline.—Faith, kind Uncle, when men abandon jealousy, forsake taking tobacco, and cease to wear their beards so rudely long. Oh! to have a husband with a mouth continually smoking, with a bush of furze on the ridge of his chin, ready still to flop into his foaming chaps; ah! 't is more than most intolerable."