The beard of the renowned Hudibras was portentous, as we learn from
Butler, who thus describes the Knight's hirsute honours:

His tawny beard was th' equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;
In cut and dye so like a tile,
A sadden view it would beguile:
The upper part whereof was whey,
The nether orange mixt with grey.
This hairy meteor did denounce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns;
With grisly type did represent
Declining age of government,
And tell, with hieroglyphic spade,
Its own grave and the state's were made.

Philip Nye, an Independent minister in the time of the Commonwealth, and
one of the famous Assembly of Divines, was remarkable for the
singularity of his beard. Hudibras, in his Heroical Epistle to the lady
of his "love," speaks of

Amorous intrigues
In towers, and curls, and periwigs,
With greater art and cunning reared
Than Philip Nye's _thanksgiving beard_.

Nye opposed Lilly the astrologer with no little virulence, for which he
was rewarded with the privilege of holding forth upon Thanksgiving Day,
and so, as Butler says, in some MS. verses,