Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Beards
How many cowards wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars!
Shakespeare.—Merchant of Venice, Act III. Scene 2. (Bassanio to himself.)
Ambiguous things that ape
Goats in their visage, women in their shape.
Byron.—The Waltz.
What a beard hast thou got! thou has got more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my phill-horse has on his tail.
Shakespeare.—Merchant of Venice, Act II. Scene 2. (Gobo to his Son.)
1.His beard was grizzly? no.
2.It was, as I have seen it in his life,
A sable silver’d.
Shakespeare.—Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2. (Hamlet and Horatio.)
Such a beard as youth gone out
Had left in ashes.
Tennyson.—Idylls of the King, Vivien.
So much a clown in gait and laugh,
He wanted but a scrip and staff;
And such a beard as hung in candles
Down to Diogenes’s sandals,
And planted all his chin thick,
Like him a dirty cynic.
Cawthorne.—Birth and Education of Genius.
A beard like an artichoke, with dry shrivelled jaws.
Sheridan.—The Duenna, Act III. Scene 7.
His beard as any sow or fox was red,
And thereto broad, as though it were a spade.
Chaucer.—Prol. to the Canterbury Tales, Line 554.
Preferring sense from chin that’s bare,
To nonsense throned in whisker’d hair.
Green.—The Spleen, Line 750.
And there he lies with a great beard, like a Russian bear upon a drift of snow.
Congreve.—The Double Dealer, Act III. Scene 5.
Sir, you have the most insinuating manner, but indeed you should get rid of that odious beard—one might as well kiss a hedgehog.
Sheridan.—The Duenna, Act II. Scene 2.