1828.] Historical and Literary, 253 



Peter issued against their beards, has diminished the respect in which 

 they were held, and reduced them many degrees in the scale of Chinese 

 estimation. 



The revolution, which that wonderful barbarian created in the costume 

 of the Russian face, is so extraordinary, as to deserve commemoration in 

 a separate paragraph. Before his time, the nobility and commonalty of 

 that overgrown empire took great pride in the enormous prolixity of 

 their beards, and, if I may judge from an expression in Hudibras, 

 excited the attention even of Western Europe : 



ef His beard was prun'd, and starch'd, and launder' d, 

 And cut square by the Russian standard." 



Beards were, however, doomed to fall, as well as Boyards, under Peter's 

 unsparing tyranny ; and, though he commenced his persecution of 

 them by making his princes as well as his peasants pay a graduated duty 

 for the privilege of retaining them, and by establishing clerks at the 

 gates of his different towns for the purpose of collecting it, he concluded 

 by ordering his officers either to pull up by the roots all the beards 

 which they saw, or to shave them off with a blunt razor, which would 

 draw the skin away after it. <e This strange and singular order," says 

 Voltaire, " troubled the vast empire of Russia, and would have cost 

 any other Czar but Peter his crown and his life." He was, however, 

 inflexible and powerful ; and, by the terror of his threats, scarce left a 

 beard in his dominions at the time of his decease. Notwithstanding 

 this hostility on his part, such was the veneration of his people for these 

 ensigns of gravity, that, if the writers of his life may be credited, "many 

 of them carefully preserved them in their cabinets, and ordered them to 

 be buried with them, imagining, perhaps, that they should make an odd 

 figure without them in the grave." The lapse of a century has done 

 away even with this feeling, and, but for the pulks of bearded Cossacks, 

 a man with a beard would be as great a curiosity in St. Petersburgh as 

 he would be in Vienna, or Paris, or London, or any other capital city 

 of civilized Europe. 



I come from Russia by a very easy transition into Germany ; and I 

 am sorry to say, that my total ignorance of German literature prevents 

 me from being as copious and instructive as I ought to be upon this 

 branch of my subject. In the time of Caesar, the Germans, though they 

 wore beards like most other savages, appeared to have cared very little 

 about their decoration. A century later, in the time of Tacitus, a 

 general shaving was a never failing accompaniment of a public rejoicing. 

 One of their tribes, small in number, but great, as that philosophical 

 historian informs us, in renown, was distinguished from the rest by the 

 anxious predilection, which it displayed for a prolixity of beard, during 

 many generations. I allude to the Lango-bardi, whose very name dis- 

 closes the ancient bushiness of their chins. Their rough and shaggy 

 appearance inspired such terror, that few of their enemies durst stay to 

 contemplate it ; and of that terror their women on one occasion success- 

 fully availed themselves, by joining the ranks of their husbands at a 

 critical opportunity, with beards made out of the hair of their heads, 

 and arranged upon their cheeks so as to give them the outward sem- 

 blance of lordly and imperial man. There was a great controversy 

 about two centuries ago respecting the beard of Charlemagne. It was 

 asserted by one party that he never wore one ; and by another, that he 

 wore one of very formidable dimensions. Turpin says that it was only 



