256 A Dissertation on Beards, ("MARCH, 



the Cid, however, lived in his ashes ; and the polluting fingers of the 

 Jew had scarcely touched it, before the corpse started from its searments 

 and half unsheathed the Cid's terrible sword Tizona. The dismayed Israelite 

 fled amain ; and, fearing lest a worse fate should befall him, atoned his 

 fault in a few days afterwards by embracing Christianity. I do not 

 mean to pledge my veracity to the truth of this statement : but as it is 

 to be found in a manuscript history of the Cid, written in the middle of 

 the twelfth century, and within fifty years of his decease, I think it 

 deserves notice, as shewing the veneration paid at a very remote period 

 by the Hidalgoes of Spain to a flowing beard. I find the same degree 

 of respect continuing to be rendered to it two centuries later. For in an 

 assembly of the Cortes of Catalonia, held A.D. 1351, Peter of Arragon, 

 wishing to distinguish between real and fictitious merit, inflicted very 

 heavy penalties both on those who fabricated, and on those who wore 

 false beards. At a period still more recent, a Spanish nobleman mort- 

 gaged the first fruits of his chin for a thousand pistoles, assuring his 

 mortgagee that all the gold in the world could not equal the value of 

 that natural ornament of his valour. Such being the case, the reader 

 will not be surprised at hearing, that the Spaniards were formerly con- 

 sidered the mould of fashion in every thing, which respected the deco- 

 ration of beards. Ben Jonson, in his Alchymist, says, that if you inquire 

 -of any milliner, courtier, or inns-of-court man, you will be told, that as 

 your Spanish gennet is the best horse, and your Spanish ruff the best 

 wear, so is your Spanish beard the best cut ; and Cervantes, in his novel 

 of the " Licentiate Vidriera," gives a curious account of the various 

 modes in which his countrymen undertook to ornament it. From his 

 statement it is quite evident that great nicety was used in the dyeing of 

 it ; and that it was not at all unusual to behold all the different colours 

 of the rainbow blended in the beard of a coxcomb of the first water. 

 He sneers at some low born fellow who had dyed one half of his beard 

 black and the other white ; and mentions, with considerable applause, 

 an ingenious stratagem, by which a young girl rescued herself from the 

 embraces of an old man, to whom her relations had contracted her 

 against her will. On the night before his wedding day, the aged lover 

 had applied some cosmetic dye to his beard, which changed it before 

 morning from a venerable white into a very juvenescent black colour. On 

 his making his appearance at the church door, thus strangely meta- 

 morphosed, his promised bride insisted that he was not the man whom 

 she was engaged to marry, and brought forward witnesses to prove that 

 the person to whom her parents had betrothed her, was not a youthful 

 black-haired Adonis, but a grave grey-headed and grey-bearded panta- 

 loon. She therefore treated him as an impostor, and thus gained time 

 to settle an elopement with a younger lover, who required not the adven- 

 titious aid of art to set off his natural accomplishments. The Princess 

 Micomicona and the Countess of Trufaldi are neither of them considered 

 by Don Quixote to be properly attended, until they are provided with 

 well-bearded 'squires which may be taken as another proof of the 

 partiality of the Spaniard to this grisly excrescence of the human face. 

 A writer of the name of Guzman, of whom I know nothing, except that 

 he is often quoted by the learned Dr. Bulwer, with whom he seems to 

 have been a prodigious favourite, shews that his countrymen had several 

 other points to mind, besides either the cut or the colour of it. He says, 

 that it was customary for every gentleman of rank to put his beard 

 at night into a press, made of two thin trenchers, ' ( screwed wonderfully 



