The beard of the renowned Hudibras was portentous, as we learn from Butler, who thus describes the Knight’s hirsute honours: 

  His tawny beard was th’ equal grace
  Both of his wisdom and his face;
  In cut and dye so like a tile,
  A sadden view it would beguile: 
  The upper part whereof was whey,
  The nether orange mixt 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.

Philip Nye, an Independent minister in the time of the Commonwealth, and one of the famous Assembly of Divines, was remarkable for the singularity of his beard.  Hudibras, in his Heroical Epistle to the lady of his “love,” speaks of

                  Amorous intrigues
  In towers, and curls, and periwigs,
  With greater art and cunning reared
  Than Philip Nye’s thanksgiving beard.

Nye opposed Lilly the astrologer with no little virulence, for which he was rewarded with the privilege of holding forth upon Thanksgiving Day, and so, as Butler says, in some MS. verses,

He thought upon it and resolved to put
His beard into as wonderful a cut.

Butler even honoured Nye’s beard with a whole poem, entitled “On Philip Nye’s Thanksgiving Beard,” which is printed in his Genuine Remains, edited by Thyer, vol. i, p. 177 ff., and opens thus: 

  A beard is but the vizard of the face,
  That nature orders for no other place;
  The fringe and tassel of a countenance
  That hides his person from another man’s,
  And, like the Roman habits of their youth,
  Is never worn until his perfect growth.

And in another set of verses he has again a fling at the obnoxious beard of the same preacher: 

  This reverend 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 even as if ’t had been
  Drawn with a pen upon the chin.

As it was customary among the peoples of antiquity who wore their beards to cut them off, and for those who shaved to allow their beards to grow, in times of mourning, so many of the Presbyterians and Independents vowed not to cut their beards till monarchy and episcopacy were utterly destroyed.  Thus in a humorous poem, entitled “The Cobler and the Vicar of Bray,” we read: 

  This worthy knight was one that swore,
    He would not cut his beard
  Till this ungodly nation was
    From kings and bishops cleared.

  Which holy vow he firmly kept,
    And most devoutly wore
  A grisly meteor on his face,
    Till they were both no more.

In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, when the royal hero leaves his infant daughter Marina in charge of his friend Cleon, governor of Tharsus, to be brought up in his house, he declares to Cleon’s wife (Act iii, sc. 3):