Cathedral Beard.
[This] Holme calls “the broad or cathedral beard, because bishops and grave men of the church anciently did wear such beards.” Besides this, and the pick-a-devant, he says there are several sorts and fashions of beards, viz. “the British beard hath long mochedoes, (mustachios) on the higher lip, hanging down either side the chin, all the rest of the face being bare:—the forked beard is a broad beard ending in two points:—the mouse-eaten beard, when the beard groweth scatteringly, not together, but here a tuft and there a tuft,” &c.
Guillaume Duprat, bishop of Clermont, who assisted at the council of Trent, and built the college of the Jesuits at Paris, had the finest beard that ever was seen. It was too fine a beard for a bishop, and the canons of his cathedral, in full chapter assembled, came to the barbarous resolution of shaving him. Accordingly, when next he came to the choir, the dean, the prevot, and the chantre approached with scissors and razors, soap, basin and warm water. He took to his heels at the sight, and escaped to his castle of Beauregard, about two leagues from Clermont, where he fell sick for vexation, and died.[302]
Ancient monuments represent the Greek heroes to have worn short curled beards. Among the Romans, after the year 454, B. C., philosophers alone constantly wore a beard; the beard of their military men was short and frizzed. The first emperors with a long and thick beard were Hadrian, who wore it to hide his wounds, and Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, who wore it as philosophers: a thick beard was afterwards considered an appendage that obtained for the emperors veneration from the people.[303]
Wigs.
A Peruke.
It is figured as seen [above] by Holme, who also calls it in his peculiar orthography a “perawicke,” and says it was likewise called “a short bob, a head of hair—a wig that hath short locks and a hairy crown.” He describes it with some feeling. “This is a counterfeit hair which men wear instead of their own; a thing much used in our days by the generality of men; contrary to our forefathers who got estates, loved their wives, and wore their own hair; but,” says he, “in these days (1688) there is no such things!”