Page:Elizabethan People.djvu/483

 A Midsummer Night's Dream is to be understood quite literally: "Either your straw-coloured beard, your orange tawny beard, your purple ingrain beard, or your French crown coloured beard, your perfect yellow." "Forsooth, they say the king has mew'd [moulted] All his gray beard, instead of which is budded Another of a pure carnation colour, speckled with green and russet" (Ford's The Broken Heart, ii. 1.) Harrison writes: "Neither will I meddle with our variety of beards, of which some are shaven from the chin like those of the Turks, not a few cut short like the beard of the Marquise Otto, some made round like a rubbing brush. ... Therefore if a man have a lean, straight face, a Marquis Otto's cut will make it broad and large; if it be platter like, a long slender beard will make it seem narrower. ... Some lusty courtiers also, and gentlemen of courage do wear either rings of gold, stones, or pearl, in their ears, whereby they imagine the workmanship of God not to be a little amended." Harrison does not mention the fact that gallants usually wore the love lock as an especial support for ladies' favours.

Stubbes writes in 1583: "They, the barbers, have invented such strange fashions of monstrous manners of cuttings, trimmings, shavings, and washings, that you would wonder to see." He