Till she be married, madam,
By bright Diana, whom we honour all,
Unscissored shall this hair of mine remain,
Though I show well in’t;

and that he meant his beard is evident from what he says at the close of the play, when his daughter is about to be married to Lysimachus, governor of Mitylene (Act v, sc. 3): 

                               And now
  This ornament, that makes me look so dismal,
  Will I, my loved Marina, clip to form;
  And what these fourteen years no razor touched,
  To grace thy marriage day, I’ll beautify.

Scott, in his Woodstock, represents Sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, whilom Ranger of Woodstock Park (or Chase), as wearing his full beard, to indicate his profound grief for the death of the “Royal Martyr,” which indeed was not unusual with elderly and warmly devoted Royalists until the “Happy Restoration”—­save the mark!

Another extraordinary beard was that of Van Butchell, the quack doctor, who died at London in 1814, in his 80th year.  This singular individual had his first wife’s body carefully embalmed and preserved in a glass case in his “study,” in order that he might enjoy a handsome annuity to which he was entitled “so long as his wife remained above ground.”  His person was for many years familiar to loungers in Hyde Park, where he appeared regularly every afternoon, riding on a little pony, and wearing a magnificent beard of twenty years’ growth, which an Oriental might well have envied, the more remarkable in an age when shaving was so generally practised.—­A jocular epitaph was composed on “Mary Van Butchell,” of which these lines may serve as a specimen: 

  O fortunate and envied man! 
  To keep a wife beyond life’s span;
  Whom you can ne’er have cause to blame,
  Is ever constant and the same;
  Who, qualities most rare, inherits
  A wife that’s dumb, yet full of spirits.

The celebrated Dr. John Hunter is said to have embalmed the body of Van Butchell’s first wife—­for the bearded empiric married again—­and the “mummy,” in its original glass case, is still to be seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeon’s, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, London.

It was once the fashion for gallants to dye their beards various colours, such as yellow, red, gray, and even green.  Thus in the play of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom the weaver asks in what kind of beard he is to play the part of Pyramis—­whether “in your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French crown-coloured beard, your perfect yellow?” (Act i, sc. 2.) In ancient church pictures, and in the miracle plays performed in medieval times, both Cain and Judas Iscariot were always represented with yellow beards.  In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly asks Simple whether his master (Slender) does not wear “a great round beard, like a glover’s paring-knife,” to which he replies:  “No, forsooth; he hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard—­a Cain-coloured beard” (Act i, sc. 4).—­Allusions to beards are of very frequent occurrence in Shakspeare’s plays, as may be seen by reference to any good Concordance, such as that of the Cowden Clarkes.