Note 592 — THE BLACK BOOK.
Reading edition
muchatoes] i. e. mustachios. So S. Rowley;
“Had my Barbour
Perfum’d my louzy thatch here, and poak’d out
My Tuskes more stiffe than are a Cats muschatoes,
These pide-wing’d Butterflyes had knowne me then.”
The Noble Spanish Soldier, 1634, sig. C.
The lines just quoted seem to shew, that, when Ursula says to Knockem, “never tusk nor twirl your dibble” (B. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair—Works, vol. iv. p. 414), she means mustachio, and not (as Gifford conjectured) beard. Mustachios, by being starched or gummed, were made to project from the corners of the mouth.