602 A Dissertation on Beards, [DEC. 



oges; and if I may take the word of a writer in the Encyclopedia Britan- 

 nica, it still retains its place in the Euchology of the Gree'ks. 



From the time of Augustus down to that of Hadrian, none but the philo- 

 sophers, as they styled themselves, wore beards. With the reign of 

 Hadrian the beard resumed its former dignity, as if to convince the world 

 that fashions were as liable to change as either weathercocks or women. 

 Just as Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou ; invented shoes with inordi- 

 nately long points, to conceal an excrescence in one of his feet ; and as 

 Charles the Seventh of France introduced long coats to hide his ill-made 

 legs; and as Duviller, an eminent professor of my own art, in the days of 

 the Spectator, created full-bottomed wigs to conceal an awkward eleva- 

 tion in the shoulder of the Dauphin ; did the Emperor Hadrian revive the 

 fashion of retaining the beard to conceal certain ugly excrescences in his 

 chin. His example was imitated by all his successors, save Caracalla, 

 Heliogabalus, and Justinian, and, as may naturally be supposed, was 

 followed by their admiring courtiers and loving subjects. Antoninus par- 

 ticularly distinguished himself by the patronage which he bestowed upon 

 the beard. Spartianus mentions, as a mark of that emperor's policy and 

 probity, that he never gave a centurion's commission to any man who was 

 not robust in person and respectable in character, nor a military tribune- 

 ship, which is equivalent to a colonel's command at present, to any officer 

 who was not adorned by a full and flowing beard. Whether Constantino 

 judged of the merits of his officers by the same criterion I do not pretend 

 to know ; but I have every reason to believe that he took pride in the title 

 of nywTflf, or Great Beard, which his soldiers conferred upon him. It was 

 perhaps owing to a sudden sight of that hairy prodigy, that, early in the 

 reign of his son Constantius, a woman gave birth to an infant, which had, 

 on its entrance into the world, a stiff black beard, to say nothing of two 

 mouths, two small ears, two large teeth, and four moderate-sized eyes, 

 which the philosophic Cardan assures us it possessed. The Emperor 

 Julian, along with the dominions, inherited the admiration of his ancestors 

 for the beard ; and what is more to my point, wrote a learned and witty 

 treatise in defence of it. The inhabitants of Antioch, whose refined habits 

 taught them to bear the inconvenience of shaving for the comfort of being 

 shaved, used every effort in their power to bring the imperial beard into 

 contempt and disrepute. Forgetful of the respect due to legitimate power, 

 they libelled his imperial majesty, when he entered their walls, by saying 

 that a butcher of victims ($vniv), and not a king, had come to take up his 

 residence among them. They even gave him the nickname of " Goat," 

 and swore that his beard was fit for nothing else than to be twisted into 

 ropes. Though the philosophic emperor disdained to take corporal ven- 

 geance on these insolent caitiffs, he did not let them off entirely scot-free. 

 He wrote his Misopogon, or Enemy of the Beard, in which he lashed 

 their intemperance, impiety, and injustice, at first with lively irony, and 

 at last with serious and bitter invective. As his work, which is seldom 

 read even by scholars, has never to my knowledge been translated into 

 English, I may perhaps be excused, considering its natural connexion with 

 the subject matter of this article, for inserting a short extract from it, not 

 so much as a specimen of the style in which its author retaliated on his 

 licentious and effeminate accusers, as of his personal appearance, habits, 

 and character. The extract, which I have selected, possesses some 

 interest, not merely because it contains a distinct summary of all the 

 annoyances which beset the heroes of the beard, but also because it is the 



