Chapter VIII: Act III (3)

While people were laughing at this illustration of pride in Paris, London was being sadly scandalized at a royal illustration of obstinacy. When William III. went to church, it was impossible to induce him to take off his hat. He might indeed doff it during the liturgy, but the preacher was no sooner in the pulpit than on went the ponderous beaver, and up fired the indignation of the beholders. William cared not a jot for their indignation. The Dutch wore their hats during Divine worship, and _he_ had not ceased to be a Hollander simply for having become a King of England. Besides, that ancient and scriptural people the Jews sat in their synagogues with their heads covered, and was not he their most religious and gracious king?—and did it not become him to follow the practices of a Biblical race, when the doing so tended to the increase of his comfort, and jumped with the inclination of his caprices? And so the broad hat was worn, and censure disregarded.

In the middle of the last century, when actors at their benefits expected great houses, the pit was not only incorporated with the boxes, but a graduated building was erected on the stage for the superflux of audience. The consequences were sometimes ridiculous enough; _exempli gratiâ_:—

When Holland, the Chiswick baker, played Hamlet, at his first benefit at Drury Lane (1762), the little tillage poured out all its inhabitants to do him both honour and profit; and I do not know if the predecessor of the present estimable rector, the Rev. Mr. Bowerbank, was not at the head of them. However this may be, there was assuredly amongst them a young Chiswick maiden, who contrived to seat herself at a corner of the lowest seat of the amphitheatre, with her feet resting on the stage.

When the Ghost appeared, Hamlet’s hat fell off; and this so excited the commiseration of the damsel from Chiswick that she gently stepped forward, picked up the hat, and with her own hands placed it upon Holland’s head, with the broad corner foremost, as it might have been worn had Hamlet been exceedingly drunk. Holland gravely finished the scene, but his appearance was too much for the gravity of the house; and although the audience, becomingly but with difficulty, restrained their risibility till the young prince with the queer hat and his respected sire’s ghost had diversely departed, they burst out into so uproarious a laugh _then_, that the whole house rang again; and Holland too when he was led to a glass, and contemplated his own counterfeit and highly ridiculous presentment.

Such was a hat on the English stage; here is one on that of America. Mr. Charles Kean, when once playing Richard, at New Orleans, observed, as he was seated on the throne, and the curtain was rising, that his noble peers wore their hats or caps in his presence. With his truncheon to his lips he contrived a stage whisper, which said, “Take off your hats; you are in the presence of the king.” “And what of that?” roared high-reaching Buckingham, looking round at the audience, and smacking his own cap tighter on his circumspect head; “what of that? I guess we know nothing of kings in this country.” The New Orleaners were in raptures, and the king sat corrected.

In old days there was not only a fashion in the hat, but also in the cock of it. The famous battle of Ramilies introduced the Ramilies cock of the hat. In No. 526 of the ‘Spectator,’ “John Sly, a haberdasher of hats, and tobacconist,” is directed to take down the names of such country gentlemen as have left the hunting for the military cock, before the approach of peace. In a subsequent number is told how the same John Sly is preparing hats for the several kinds of heads that make figures in the realm of Great Britain, with cocks significant of their powers and faculties. His hats for men of the faculties of law and physic do but just turn up to give a little life to their sagacity. His military hats glare full in the face; and he has prepared a familiar easy cock for all good companions between the above-mentioned extremes.

Admiring mothers would sooner have followed their sons to the grave than see them walk about with hats uncocked,—whether the form took that of a spout or the point of a mince-pie. The German _Kevenhüller_ came on about the accession of George III. They were as tasteless as those French _chapeaux à cornes_, of whom Mr. Bob Fudge says that he

“would back Mrs. Draper
To cut better weather-boards out of brown paper.”

At this time, we are told, there was the military cock and the mercantile cock; and while the beaux of St. James’s wore their hats under their arms, the beaux of Moorfields Mall wore them diagonally over their left or right eye. Some wore their hats with the corners which should come over their foreheads, in a direct line, pointed into the air. These were the Gawkies. Others did not above half cover their heads, which was indeed owing to the shallowness of their crowns. A hat with gold binding bespoke a man given to the pleasures of the turf. The tiny Nivernois hat came into fashion early in the reign of the third George; and it is said that gold-laced cocked hats used to be worn in the year ’78, because they had a military look with them, and would therefore protect the wearer against the press-gangs that were then more than usually active.

When round hats came in, at first merely for morning or undress wear, but finally became a _fait accompli_, like that other little matter, the French Revolution, all the young wearers of them (and there were, at first, no others) were denounced as “blackguards” and “highwaymen.” The youthful votaries of fashion retorted by nicknaming the three-cornered hats, as “Egham, Staines, and Windsor,” in allusion to the three-fingered road-post pointing in that tripartite direction. The flat, folding, crescent-shaped beaver, called a cocked or an opera hat, was still to be seen as late as 1818; and a party of gentlemen returning on foot from Almack’s on a summer’s morning, with pantaloons tight as the Venetian standard-bearer’s, and hats cocked according to the mode, presented a rather martial look. Since that time, the round hat has gained headway; even coachmen only wear the old cocked covering on state occasions; and the ugliest article that ever could be devised for the purpose seems to be planted upon our unwilling brows for ever.

In New, as formerly in Old, England, Quakers objected to take off their hats. A judge in the former locality once remarked thereon, that if he thought there was any religion in a hat, he would have the largest he could purchase for money. Poor Essex, at his mock trial before his enemies in Elizabeth’s palace, was compelled to stand uncovered. He was so embarrassed with his hat and the papers in it, that he forgot something of what he had to say; and perhaps too much care for his hat helped him to lose his head.

Finally, do my readers know why “beaver” was the originally favourite material for a hat? Dr. Marius was told by a Jew physician of Ulm, that it was because by wearing a cap of beaver’s fur, anointing the head once a month with oil of castor, and taking two or three ounces of it in a year, a man’s memory may be so strengthened that he will remember everything he reads. I would eschew French velvet, and would stick to beaver, if I thought _that_.

And now as hats were put upon heads, the next fashion that will naturally come under our notice is the fashion of Wigs and their Wearers. Previous to turning to which, I may mention, by way of being useful, that “beaver” is not beaver in our days; and that perhaps is why we are all so forgetful of our duties. English beaver is a mixture of lamb’s wool and rabbit’s fur. Silk, satin, and velvet hats are made of plush, woven for the most part in the north of England. _Paris_ hats are made in London from French plush, of which we import annually about 150,000 lbs. We export few hats except to our own colonies. They are chiefly made, like our wigs, for native wear.

WIGS AND THEIR WEARERS.

“Wigs were to protect obstinate old heads from the rays of
truth.”—ANONYMOUS AUTHOR.

When it is said that Hadrian was the first Roman Emperor who wore a wig, nothing more is meant than that he was the first who avowedly wore one. They were common enough before his time. Caligula and Messalina put them on, for purposes of disguise, when they were abroad at night; and Otho condescended to conceal his baldness with what he fain hoped his subjects would accept as a natural head of hair belonging to one who bore the name of Cæsar.

As for the origin of wigs, the honour of the invention is attributed to the luxurious Iapygians, in Southern Italy. The Louvain theologians, who published a French version of the Bible, affected however to discover the first mention of perukes in a passage in the fourth chapter of Isaiah. The Vulgate has these words:—“Decalvabit Dominus verticem filiarum Sion, et Dominus crinem earum nudabit.” This the Louvain gentlemen translated into French as follows:—“Le Seigneur déchevelera les têtes des filles de Sion; et le Seigneur découvrira leurs perruques.” The which, done into English, implies that “The Lord will pluck the hair from the heads of the daughters of Sion, and will expose their periwigs.” My fair friend, you would perhaps fling your own in my face were I to presume to tell you what the true reading is.

In the above free-and-easy translation, the theologians in question followed no less an authority than St. Paulinus of Nola, and thus had respectable warrant for their singular mistake.

Allusions to wigs are frequently made both by the historians and poets of ancient times. We know that they were worn by fashionable gentlemen in Palmyra and Baalbec, and that the Lycians took to them out of necessity. When their conqueror, Mausoleus, had ruthlessly ordered all their heads to be shaven, the poor Lycians felt themselves so supremely ridiculous, that they induced the king’s general Condalus, by means of an irresistible bribe, to permit them to import wigs from Greece; and the symbol of their degradation became the very pink of Lycian fashion.

Hannibal was a stout soldier, but on the article of perukes he was as finical as Jessamy in ‘Lionel and Clarissa,’ and as particular as Dr. Hoadley’s Ranger,—as nice about their fashion as the former, and as philosophical as the latter on their look. Hannibal wore them sometimes to improve, sometimes to disguise, his person; and if he wore one long enough to spoil its beauty, he was as glad as the airy gentleman in ‘The Suspicious Husband,’ to fling it aside when it wore a battered aspect.

Ovid and Martial celebrate the gold-coloured wigs of Germany. The latter writer is very severe on the dandies and coquettes of his day, who thought to win attraction under a wig. Propertius, who could describe so tenderly and appreciate so well what was lovely in girlhood, whips his butterflies into dragons at the bare idea of a nymph in a _toupet_. Venus Anadyomene herself would have had no charms for that gentle sigher of sweet and enervating sounds, had she wooed him in borrowed hair. If he was not particular touching morals, he was very strict concerning curls.

If the classical poets winged their satirical shafts against wigs, these were as little spared by the mimic thunderbolts of the Fathers, Councils, and Canons of the early Church. Even poets and Christian elders could no more digest human hair than can the crocodile,—of whom, dead, it is said, you may know how many individuals he devoured living by the number of hair-balls in the stomach, which can neither digest nor eject them. The indignation of Tertullian respecting these said wigs is something perfectly terrific. Not less is that of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who especially vouches for the virtue of his simple sister Gorgonia, for the reason that she neither cared to curl her own hair, nor to repair its lack of beauty by the aid of a wig. The thunder of St. Jerome against these adornments was quite as loud as that of any of the Fathers. They were preached against as unbecoming to Christianity. Council after Council, from the first at Constantinople to the last Provincial Council at Tours, denounced wigs even when worn in joke. “There is no joke in the matter!” exclaimed the exceedingly irate St. Bernard; “the woman who wears a wig commits a mortal sin!” St. John Chrysostom cites St. Paul against the fashion, arguing that they who prayed or preached in wigs could not be said to worship or to teach the Word of God “with head uncovered.” “Look!” says Cyprian to the wearers of false hair; “look at the Pagans! they pray in veils. What better are you than Pagans if you come to prayers in perukes?” Many local Synods would authorize no fashion of wearing the hair but straight and short. This form was especially enjoined on the clergy generally. St. Ambrose as strictly enjoined the fashion upon the ladies of his diocese: “Do not talk to me of curls,” said this hard-working prelate; “they are the _lenocinia formæ, non præcepta virtutis_.” The ladies smiled. It was to some such obdurate and beautiful rebels that Cyprian once gravely preached, saying: “Give heed to me, O ye women! Adultery is a grievous sin; but she who wears false hair is guilty of a greater.”

It must have been a comfortable state of society when two angry ladies could exclaim to each other, “You may say of me what you please; you may charge me with breaking the seventh commandment; but, thank Heaven and Cyprian, you cannot accuse me of wearing a wig!”

No pains were spared to deter women from this enormity. St. Jerome holds up the fate of Prætexta as a warning to all ladies addicted to the fashion of the world. Prætexta was a very respectable lady, married to a somewhat paganish husband, Hymetius. Their niece, Eustochia, resided with them. At the instigation of the husband, Prætexta took the shy Eustochia in hand, attired her in a splendid dress, and covered her fair neck with ringlets. Having enjoyed the sight of the modest maiden so attired, Prætexta went to bed. To that bedside immediately descended an angel, with wrath upon his brow, and billows of angry sounds rolling from his lips. “Thou hast,” said the spirit, “obeyed thy husband rather than the Lord, and hast dared to deck the hair of a virgin, and made her look like a daughter of earth. For this do I wither up thy hands, and bid them recognize the enormity of thy crime in the amount of thy anguish and bodily suffering. Five months more shalt thou live, and then Hell shall be thy portion; and if thou art bold enough to touch the head of Eustochia again, thy husband and thy children shall die even before thee.”

St. Jerome pledges himself for the truth of this story, which is exceedingly perplexing and utterly unintelligible.

The ladies were more difficult of management than the clergy. The former were not to be terrified by the assurance, that breaking an ordinance of men was a worse crime than breaking one of the commandments of God. The hair of the clergy was kept straight, by decree of forfeiture of revenues or benefice against incumbents who approached the altars with curls even of their natural hair. Pomades and scented waters were denounced as damnable inventions; but anathema was uttered against the priest guilty of wearing one single hair combed up above its fellows. The well-curled Bishop of Oxford would have been in the olden time _ipso facto_, because of being so curled, excommunicated,—according to the decree of the Council of Lateran (Gregory II.), which says:—“Cuicumque ex clericis comam relaxaverit, anathema sit!”

“All personal disguise,” says Tertullian, “is adultery before God. All perukes, paint, and powder are such disguises, and inventions of the devil;” _ergo_, etc. This zealous individual appeals to personal as often as to religious feeling. “If you will not fling away your false hair,” says he, “as hateful to Heaven, cannot I make it hateful to yourselves, by reminding you that the false hair you wear may have come not only from a criminal but from a very dirty head, perhaps from the head of one already damned?”

This was a very hard hit indeed; but it was not nearly so clever a stroke at wigs as that dealt by Clemens of Alexandria. The latter informed the astounded wig-wearers that, when they knelt at church to receive the blessing, they must be good enough to recollect that the benediction remained on the wig, and did not pass through to the wearer! This was a stumbling-block to the people; many of whom however retained the peruke, and took their chance as to the percolating through it of the benediction.

On similarly obstinate people, Tertullian railed with a hasty charge of ill-prepared logic. “You were not born with wigs,” said he; “God did not give them to you. God not giving them, you must necessarily have received them from the devil.” It was manifest that so rickety a syllogism was incapable of shaking the lightest _scratch_ from a reasoning Christian’s skull. Indeed the logic of Tertullian, when levied against wigs, is exceedingly faulty. Men of the world he points out as being given to over-scrupulous cleanliness. Your _saint_ is dirty from an impulse of duty; were he otherwise, he might be too seductive to the weaker sex. This reminds me of the monk of Prague who was blind, but he had so fine a nose that he was able to distinguish between a saint and a sinner by the smell!

Not only were the Scriptures pressed into service against those who wore false hair or dyed their own, but zealous Christian priests quoted even heathen writers to shame men out of the custom. It is a remarkable thing how well acquainted these well-meaning, but somewhat over-straining, personages were with the erotic poets of heathendom.

Before the period of the Conquest, ecclesiastics were hardly distinguishable from the laity except by the tonsure; and of this they seem to have been partly ashamed, for they concealed it, to the best of their ability, by brushing the long hair around it, so as to cover the distinctive mark. It was only the great dignitaries who wore beards: had a poor priest ventured to carry one on his face, he would have had the one pulled and the other slapped by his ecclesiastical superiors. The inferior clergy cared nothing about the matter till beards were interdicted, as far as _they_ were concerned; and when the Council of Limoges, in 1031, decreed that the wearing of the beard was to be entirely optional, all concerned lost all concern in the question. Desire had only fastened itself upon what was forbidden. As for the more dignified clergy of the period, they were the most splendid dressers of the day; and the greatest “dandies” were those who officiated at the altar. No censure directed against their extravagance in this respect had any effect upon them. It was only when the reproof seemingly came from Heaven that they cared for it; as in the case of the young soldier in the army of Stephen, who was intensely vain of the locks which fell from his crown to his knees, and which he suddenly cut off close to the roots, in consequence of dreaming that the devil was strangling him with his own luxuriant ringlets. The dream did not cure other fops. In the days of King John, our excellent fathers actually curled their hair with crisping irons, and bound their locks with fillets, like girls. They went bareheaded lest the beauty of their curls should be disturbed by a cap; and they were not at all the sort of men that we should suspect of having wrung Magna Charta from the King;—that Magna Charta the original copy of which once fell into the hands of a tailor, who was cutting it up into other measures for men, when it was rescued, not without difficulty, and consigned to its present safe custody in the British Museum.

English _ladies_ (despite the fact that English lords cherished wigs even in the days of Stephen) do not appear to have adopted the fashion of wearing wigs until about the year 1550. Junius, in his ‘Commentarium de Comâ,’ says that false hair came into use here with the ladies about that time, and that such use had never before been adopted by English matrons. Some three hundred years before this, the Benedictine monks at Canterbury, who were canons of the cathedral, very pathetically represented to Pope Innocent IV. that they were subject to catch very bad colds from serving in the wide and chilly cathedral bareheaded. The Pontiff gave them solemn permission to guard against cathedral rheum, bronchitis, and phthisis, by covering their heads with the hood common to their order; bidding them have especial care however to fling back the hood at the reading of the Gospel, and at the elevation of the host. Zealous churchmen have been very indignant at the attempts made to prove that the permission of Innocent IV. might be construed as a concession to priests, allowing them to wear wigs if they were so minded. The question was settled at the Great Council of England, held in London in 1268. That Council refused to sanction the wearing by clerics of “quas vulgo _coifas_ vocant,” except when they were travelling. If a coif even was profane, a wig to this Council would have taken the guise of the unpardonable sin. It is, however, well known that although Rome forbade a priest to officiate with covered head, permission to do so was purchaseable. In fact, the rule of Rome was not founded, as it was asserted to be, on Scripture. Permission was readily granted to the Romish priests in China to officiate with covered heads, as being more agreeable to the native idea there of what was seemly.

Native sentiment nearer home was much less regarded. Thus, when the Bulgarians complained to Pope Nicholas, that their priests would not permit them to wear, during church-time, those head-wrappers, or turbans, which it was their habit never to throw off, the Pontiff returned an answer which almost took the brief and popular form of “Serve you right!” and the Bulgarians, on the other hand, took nothing by their motion.

Our Anselm of Canterbury was as little conceding to the young and long-haired nobles of his day as was Pope Nicholas to the Bulgarians. Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, relates that on one occasion (Ash Wednesday) the Primate soundly rebuked the hirsute aristocracy, put them in penance, and refused them absolution, until they had submitted to be close shorn. The prelate in question would allow none to enter his cathedral who wore either long or false hair.

Against both the objection remained for a lengthened period insuperable. When Henry I. of England was in France, Sirron, Bishop of Séez, told him that Heaven was disgusted at the aspect of Christians in long hair, or who wore on manly heads locks that perhaps originally came from female brows. They were, he said, sons of Belial for so offending:—“Pervicaces filii Belial, capita sua cornis mulierum ornata.”

The King looked grave: the prelate insinuatingly invited the father of his people, who wore long if not false hair, to set a worthy example. “We’ll think of it,” said the sovereign. “No time like the present,” replied the prelate, who produced a pair of scissors from his episcopal sleeve, and advanced towards Henry, prepared to sweep off those honours which the monarch would fain have preserved. But what was the sceptre of the prince to the forceps of the priest? The former meekly sat down at the entrance of his tent, while Bishop Sirron clipped him with the skilful alacrity of Figaro. Noble after noble submitted to the same operation; and, while these were being docked by the more dignified clergy, a host of inferior ecclesiastics passed through the ranks of the grinning soldiers, and cut off hair enough to have made the fortunes of all the periwig builders who rolled in gilded chariots during the palmy days of the _Grand Monarque_.

In what then but in profligate days could wigs have triumphed in England? Periwigs established themselves victoriously (dividing even the Church) under Louis XIV. When a boy, that king had such long and beautiful hair, that a fashion ensued for all classes to wear at least an imitation thereof. When Louis began to lose his own, he also took to false adornment; and full-bottomed wigs bade defiance to the canons of the Church.

Charles II. did not bring the fashion with him to Whitehall. On the contrary, he withstood it. He forbade the members of the University to wear periwigs, smoke tobacco, or read their sermons. The members did all three, and Charles soon found himself doing the first two. “On the 2nd November, 1663,” says Pepys, “I heard the Duke say, that he was going to wear a periwig; and they say the King also will. I never till this day,” he adds, “observed that the King was so mighty grey.” This perhaps was the reason why Charles stooped to assume what he had before denounced. Pepys himself had adventured on the step in the previous May; and what a business it was for the little man! Hear him. “8th. At Mr. Jervas’s, my old barber. I did try two or three borders and periwigs, meaning to wear one; and yet I have no stomach for it; but that the pains of keeping my hair clean is so great. He trimmed me, and at last I parted; but my mind was almost altered from my first purpose, from the trouble which I foresee will be in wearing them also.” He took some time to make up his mind; and only in October of the same year does he take poor Mrs. Pepys “to my periwig maker’s, and there showed my wife the periwig made for me, and she likes it very well.”

In April, 1665, the wig was in the hands of Jervas, under repair. In the meantime, our old friend took to his natural hair; but early in May we find him recording, “that this day, after I had suffered my own hayre to grow long, in order to wearing it, I find the convenience of periwigs is so great, that I have cut off all short again, and will keep to periwigs.” In the autumn, on Sunday the 3rd of September, the wicked little gallant moralizes thus on periwigs and their prospects. “Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but durst not wear, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it; and it is a wonder what will be the fashion, after the plague is done, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any hayre for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.” The plague and fear thereof were clean forgotten before many months had passed; and in June, 1666, Pepys says:—“Walking in the galleries at Whitehall, I find the ladies of honour dressed in their riding-garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just for all the world like mine; and buttoned their doublets up their breasts, with periwigs and with hats. So that only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats, nobody could take them for women in any point whatever; which was an odd sight, and a sight that did not please me.” The moralist at Whitehall, however, could forget his mission when at “Mercer’s.” There, on the 14th of August, 1666, the thanksgiving day for the recent naval victory, after “hearing a piece of the Dean of Westminster’s sermon,” dining merrily, enjoying the sport at the Bear Garden, and letting off fireworks, the periwig philosopher, with his wife, Lady Penn, Pegg and Nan Wright, kept it up at Mrs. Mercer’s after midnight; “and there, mighty merry, smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, until most of us were like devils. And that being done, then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink; and up stairs we went and then fell into dancing, W. Battelier dancing well; and dressing him and I, and one Mr. Banister, who, with my wife, came over also with us, like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s, like a boy. And Mr. Wright, and my wife, and Pegg Penn put on periwigs, and thus we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry;”—and little troubled with the thought whether the skull which had afforded the hair for such periwig were lying in the pest-fields or not.

By the following year, our rising gentleman grows extravagant in his outlay for such adornments; and he who had been content to wear a wig at 23_s._ buys now a pair for £4. 10_s._,—“mighty fine; indeed too fine, I thought, for me.” And yet, amazingly proud was the macaroni of his purchase, recording two days afterwards, that he had been “to church, and, with my mourning, very handsome; and new periwig made a great show.”

Doubtless, under James II., his periwigged pate made a still greater show; for then had wigs become stupendous in their architecture. The beaux who stood beneath them, as I have stated in another page, carried exquisite combs in their ample pockets, with which, whether in the Mall, at the rout, in the private box, or engaged in the laborious work of “making love,” they ever and anon combed their periwigs, and rendered themselves irresistible.

Even at that period, Wisdom was thought to be beneath the Wig. “A full wig,” says Farquhar in his ‘Love and a Bottle’ (1698), “is as infallible a token of wit as the laurel;” an assertion which I should never think of disputing.

Tillotson is the first of our clergy represented in a wig, and _that_ a mere substitute for the natural head of hair. “I can remember,” he says, in one of his sermons, “since the wearing of the hair below the ears was looked upon as a sin of the first magnitude; and when ministers generally, whatever their text was, did either find or make occasion to reprove the great sin of long hair; and if they saw any one in the congregation guilty in that kind, they would point him out particularly, and _let fly at him_ with great zeal.”

The victory of Ramilies introduced the Ramilies wig, with its peculiar, gradually diminishing, plaited tail, and tie, consisting of a great bow at top, and a smaller one at the bottom. This wig survived till the reign of George III. The macaronis of 1729 wore “a macaw-like toupee and a portentous tail.” But when the French Revolution came in contact with any system,—from the German Empire to perukes,—that system perished in the collision. So periwigs ceased, like the dynasty of the Doges of Venice; and all that remains to remind us of by-gone glories in the former way, is to be found in the Ramilies tie, which still clings to court coats, though the wigs have fallen from the head, never again to rise.

Lady Wortley Montague makes a severe remark in her letters, less against wigs indeed than their wearers. She is alluding to an alleged custom in the East of branding every convicted liar on the forehead; and she smartly adds, that if such a custom prevailed in England, the entire world of beaux here would have to pull their periwigs down to their eyebrows.

Tillotson, as I have noticed above, makes reference to the opposition which perukes met with from the pulpit. The hostility from that quarter in England was faint, compared with the fiery antagonism which blazed in France. In the latter country, the privilege of wearing long hair belonged, at one time, solely to royalty. Lombard, Bishop of Paris, in the middle of the twelfth century induced royalty not to make the privilege common, but to abolish it altogether. The French monarchs wore their own hair cut short, until the reign of Louis XIII., who was the first King of France who wore a wig. To the fashion set by him is owing that France ultimately became the paradise of perruquiers.

In 1660, they first appeared on the heads of a few dandy abbés. As Ireland, in Edward Dwyer, or “Edward of the Wig,” has preserved the memory of the first of her sons who took to a periwig, so France has handed down the Abbé de la Rivière, who died Bishop of Langres, as being the ecclesiastical innovator on whose head first rested a wig, with all the consequences of such guilty outrage of canonical discipline. The indignation of strict churchmen was extreme; and as the fashion began to spread amongst prelates, canons, and curés, the Bishop of Toul sat himself down and wrote a “blast” against perukes, the wearing of which, he said, unchristianized those who adopted the fashion. It was even solemnly announced that a man had better not pray at all than pray with his head so covered. No profanity was intended when zealous, close-cropped, and bareheaded ecclesiastics reminded their bewigged brethren, that they were bound to imitate Christ in all things; and then asked them, if the Saviour were likely to recognize a resemblance to himself in a priest under a wig.

Nor was this feeling confined to the Romish Church in France. The Reformed Church was fully as hostile against the new and detested fashion. Bordeaux was in a state of insurrection, for no other reason than that the Calvinist pastor there had refused to admit any of his flock in wigs to the sacrament. And when Riviers, Protestant Professor of Theology at Leyden, wrote his ‘Libertas Christiana circa Usum Capillitii Defensa’ in behalf of perukes, the ultra-orthodox in both churches turned to gore him. The Romanists asked, what could be expected from a Protestant but rank heresy? and the Protestants disowned a brother who defended a fashion which had originated with a Romanist. Each party stood by the words of Paul to the Corinthians. In vain did some suggest that the apostolical injunction was only local. The ultras would heed no such suggestion, and would have insisted on bare heads at both poles.

“And yet,” remarked the wiggites, “it is common for preachers to preach in caps.” “Ay,” retorted the orthodox, “but that is simply because they are then speaking only in their own name. Reading the Gospel or offering up the adorable sacrifice, they are speaking or acting in the name of the Universal Church. Of course,” they added, “there are occasions when even a priest may be covered. If a Pope invented the _baret_, a curé may wear a cap.”

Sylvester was the first Pontiff who wore a mitre, but even that fashion became abused; and in the year 1000 a Pope was seen with his mitre on during mass,—a sight which startled the faithful, and a fact which artists would be none the worse for remembering. _After_ that period, bishops took to them so pertinaciously that they hardly laid them by on going to bed. These prelates were somewhat scandalized, when the Popes granted to certain dukes the privilege of wearing the mitre; but when the like favour was granted to abbots of a peculiar class, the prelatic execration was uttered with a jealous warmth that was perfectly astounding.

When the moderns brought the question back to its simple principles, and asked the sticklers for old customs if wigs were not as harmless as mitres, they were treated with as scant courtesy as Mr. Gorham or the Lord Primate is in the habit of experiencing at the hands of a “mediæval” bishop. If, it was said, a priest must even take off his _calotte_ in presence of a king or Pope, how may he dare to wear a wig before God? Richelieu was the first ecclesiastic of his rank in France who wore the modern _calotte_; but I very much doubt if he ever took it off in the presence of Louis XIII. It is known however that the French King’s ambassador, M. d’Oppeville, found much difficulty in obtaining an audience at Rome. He wore a wig _à calotte_,—that is, a wig with a _coif_, as though the tonsure had been regularly performed, and that the wig was natural hair. The officials declared he could not be introduced unless he took off the _calotte_. He could not do this without taking off the wig also, as he showed the sticklers of court etiquette, and stood before them with clean-shaven head; asking, at the same time,—“Would the Pope desire me to stand in his presence in such a plight as this?” The Pontiff however did not yield the point readily. Perhaps his Holiness, had he received the ambassador under bare poll, would have graciously served him as one of his predecessors had served the Irish saint, Malachi,—put his pontifical tiara on the good man’s head, to prevent his catching cold!

But of all the tilters against wigs, none was so serious and chivalresque as “Jean Batiste Thiers, Docteur en Théologie et Curé de Champrond.” Dr. Thiers, in the year 1690, wrote a book of some six hundred pages against the wearing of wigs by ecclesiastics. He published the same at his own expense; and high authority pronounced it conformable in every respect to the “Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Dr. Thiers wrote a brief preface to his work, in which he invokes an abundant visitation of divine peace and grace on those who read his volume with tranquillity of mind, and who preferred truth to fashion. The invocation, I fear, is made in vain; for the tediousness of the author slays all tranquillity of spirit on the part of the reader, who cannot however refrain from smiling at seeing the very existence of Christianity made to depend upon the question of perukes. The book is a dull book: but the prevailing idea in it,—that it is all over with religion if perukes be not abolished,—is one that might compel a cynic to inextinguishable laughter. Yes, says the Doctor, the origin of the tonsure is to be found in the cutting of Peter’s hair by the Gentiles, to make him look ridiculous; _therefore_, he who hides the tonsure beneath a peruke insults the Prince of the Apostles! A species of reasoning, anything comparable with which is not to be found in that book which Rome has honoured by condemning—Whately’s ‘Logic.’

The volume however affords evidence of the intense excitement raised in France by the discussion of the bearing of wigs on Christianity. For a season, the question in some degree resembled, in its treatment at least, that of baptismal regeneration, as now treated among ourselves. No primitively-minded prelate would license a curé who professed neutrality on the matter of wigs. The wearers of these were often turned out of their benefices; but then they were welcomed in other dioceses, by bishops who were heterodoxly given to the mundane comfort of wiggery. Terrible scenes took place in vestries between wigged priests ready to repair to the altar, and their brethren or superiors who sought to prevent them. Chapters suspended such priests from place and profit; Parliaments broke the decree of suspension, and Chapters renewed the interdict. Decree was abolished by counter-decree, and the whole Church was rent in twain by the contending parties.

Louis XIV. took the conservative side of the question, so far as it regarded ecclesiastics; and the Archbishop of Rheims fondly thought he had clearly settled the dispute by decreeing, that wigs might or might not be worn, according to circumstances. They were allowed to infirm and aged priests, but never at the altar. One consequence was that many priests used first to approach near to the altar, and there taking off their wigs, deposit the same, under protest, in the hands of attending notaries. Such a talk about heads had not kept a whole city in confusion since the days wherein St. Fructuarius, Bishop of Braga, decreed the penalty of entirely-shaven crowns against all the monks of that city caught in the fact of kissing any of its maidens. Three-fourths of the grave gentlemen thus came under the razor! Such would not have been the case, good reader, with you and me. Certainly not! We would not have been found out, and we know better than to “kiss and tell, as they do at Brentford.”

Thiers could not see in the wig the uses discerned by Cumberland, who says, in his ‘Choleric Man,’—“Believe me, there is much good sense in old distinctions. When the law lays down its full-bottomed periwig, you will find less wisdom in bald pates than you are aware of.” The Curé of Champrond says that the French priests, who yearly spent their thirty or forty pistoles in wigs, were so irreligious that they kept their best wigs for the world, and their oldest for God!—wearing the first in drawing-rooms, and the latter in church. This was certainly less ingenious than in the case of the man celebrated in the ‘Connoisseur,’ who, having but one peruke, made it pass for two:—“It was naturally a kind of flowing bob; but by the occasional addition of two tails, it sometimes passed as a major.”

In France wigs ended by assuming the appearance of nature. In the Reign of Terror, the modish blonde perukes worn by females were made of hair purchased from the executioner, of whom old ladies bought the curls which had clustered about the young necks that had been severed by the knife of Samson. But after this the fashion ceased among women, as it had already done among men, beginning to do so with the latter when Franklin appeared in his own hair, unpowdered, at the Court of Louis XVI.; and from that period wigs have belonged only to history.

If you please, gentle reader, we will now descend from the wig to the beard.

BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS.

“Now of beards there be
Such a company,
Of fashions such a throng,
That it is very hard
To treat of the beard,
Though it be ne’er so long.”

_Ballad_
in LE PRINCE D’AMOUR. (1650.)

Whoever invented wigs, proud as he may be of the achievement, cannot boast of the same antiquity for his fashion as that which attaches to the beard. The beard, like sewing, came in with or was a consequence of sin. With respect to sewing and sin, I have before spoken; and I will only add here, that in the most prosperous times of Puritanism, it was the fashion for Puritan ladies to wear aprons only of a green colour, that being presumedly the colour of the apron worn by Eve, whose daughters they were, and the remembrance of whose sin and the acknowledgment of their own, they perpetuated in the adopted fashion of their day.

It is confidently asserted by Dutch philosophers,—_so_ confidently that to suppose they have not good authority for what they assert, would be very ungenerous on my part,—it is asserted then by these Hollanders that Adam was created without a beard, and that the latter appendage was suddenly conferred on his chin on the very evening of the day that he had been such a “beast” as to allow himself to be beguiled into rebellion by his wife. He was consequently so far changed into the similitude of a beast, being rendered most like the goat, who is an impostor in his way, wearing as he does the grave airs of a judge, and yet being given to very frolicsome indulgences, in which judges should not, though they often do, indulge.

If this be fact, one may wonder why Eve and her daughters generally escaped this badge of opprobrium. It was perhaps on the principle according to which we punish the receiver more than the thief. If there were no receivers there would be less pilferers; and though Eve offered the temptation, if Adam had only resisted it, the consequences would have been confined within their original narrow limits, and Mr. Mechi’s razor-strops would have been without a market.

Van Helmont, in support of this theory, asks us if we ever saw a good angel with a beard;—one of those questions which are supposed by those who put them to determine a dispute at once. He falls to another conclusion thereupon; and maintains that if good angels do not wear beards, the men who _do_ are guilty of profanity, and love goats rather than godliness. Van Helmont himself was extremely perplexed by the Jesuit casuists, who wrote on the lawfulness of beards, and who most lucidly proved, under three heads,—1st, That we are bound to shave the beard; 2nd, That we are bound to let it grow; and 3rd, That we may do either the one or the other.

St. François de Sales, the gentleman saint, was less perplexing when, on being asked by a lady whether she might not _rouge_, smiled, and answered, certainly, if she only painted one cheek.

Van Helmont hit the happy medium left by the Jesuitical argument, and, shaving his beard, only cultivated his mustachios.

Southey is rather inclined to accept the Dutch account of the derivation of beards, based as it is on the certainty that no man ever saw a good angel wearing one; “for,” says he, “take the most beautiful angel that ever painter designed or engraver copied, put him on a beard, and the celestial character will be so entirely destroyed, that the simple appendage of a tail will cacodæmonize the Eudæmon.” So it may be said, that a monk with a fine polished bald head is hedged with a sort of divinity, and looks altogether reverend; but only sprinkle powder from a dredging-box upon the baldness, and you make him, if not ridiculous, certainly mundane.

The English clergy do not appear to have estimated beards by Van Helmont’s scale. One of the body, in the reign of Elizabeth, cherished his beard as an incentive to righteousness. “He wore it,” he said, “to remind him that no act of his life should be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance.” This good gentleman’s beard assuredly did not deserve what Shakspeare affirms some men’s _do_, namely, “not so honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher’s cushion, or to be entombed in an ass’s pack-saddle.” Henry VIII. on the other hand, would not tolerate monitorism even from his own beard, and he accordingly and characteristically cut it short. Perhaps this monarch wished also to have it out of the way of petitioners; for stroking the beard, in sign of supplication for mercy, was for thousands of years a recognized fashion, as may be seen in the Classics, and in Shakspeare, _passim_. It will be remembered that Hudibras stroked his own beard before he proceeded to “honour the shadow” of the lady’s shoe-tie. This act has been editorially declared to have been done as in sign of asking for her favour; from the recollection, I suppose, of Thetis “palming” the chin of Jupiter; but I think it was merely a piece of gallantry, “dressing” as it were, for the occasion, as in Congreve’s ‘Way of the World,’ wherein it is said, “The gentlemen wait but to comb, Madam, and will wait on you.” Formerly, no gallant ascended to a lady’s boudoir without first combing his peruke at the foot of the stairs, and assuring himself, by a glance at his pocket mirror, that he was as well-looking a fop as ever wasted morning in talking nonsense to a speaking and painted doll.

To pull another person’s beard, was to inflict on the wearer the most degrading insult that could be thought of. When the Jew, who hated and feared the living Cid Rui Dios, heard that the great Spaniard was dead, he contrived to get into the room where the body lay, and he indulged his revengeful spirit by contemptuously plucking at the beard. But the “son of somebody” (the _hidalgo_) was plucked temporarily into life and indignation by the outrage; and starting half up, endeavoured to get at his sword,—an attempt which killed the Jew by the mere fright which it caused.

To shave a Moslem’s beard was once a penalty as terrible as to a Chinese the cutting off of his extended tail; and Christian princes have so esteemed the appendage, that they have pawned the beard, or a portion of it, for money lent, and redeemed the sacred pledge punctually at the promised hour. They would have forfeited all claim to be honoured of men, or rewarded of God, had they failed in their contract. In modern times they pledge only their words; and as words are of less value than beards, they are not so careful about the redemption thereof. That terribly mendacious personage, the Czar Nicholas, has, at all events, made his “parole de _gentleman_” to be synonymous with deliberate falsehood.

The beard however was long a cherished ornament of Russian chins, and the Czar Peter was accused of profanity against that orthodoxy which so distinguishes his successors by abolishing them. He certainly abolished the huge and spreading honours of the Muscovite jaws by a rough process. Taxes were laid upon them, which had their weight upon every hair; and when the recalcitrant were encountered in the street, they were seized, and their beards either torn from them, or shaved off with an oyster-knife, whereby half the chin went with the entire beard. The loyal nobility compromised the matter by preserving their beards in their cabinets, to be buried with them. They conjectured that the angels would neither know nor welcome them if they presented themselves at Heaven’s gate with clean chins: they thought more of these than of clean souls.

Taylor, the water poet, catalogues in rough rhymes the various fashions after which beards were worn. They are too tedious to enumerate, and yet do not enumerate every fashion; for omission is made of the fact that it was once the very “sweetest” mode to wear strings to the beard, as Jack the highwayman did to the knees of his breeches, and the Kings of Persia, who interwove their beards with gold thread. The “cane-coloured” beard was always held as detestable, that hue having been, according to tradition, that of the beard of the traitor Judas. The famous Count Brühl, who lost Saxony but preserved a collection of wigs, was more practical than the Water Poet. His wig museum not only contained every variety, but they were chronologically arranged, from the days of Aaron to those of the Count’s own time. I may add, that I have never heard of the beard being held in dishonour except among the Chaymas, in South America, who have a great antipathy against it.

Apollo and Mercury are the only deities of olden times who are represented beardless. When professional barbers first arose it would be difficult to say; Rome got hers from where she procured her cooks—Sicily; but the Eternal City was four centuries and a half old before the chins of her sons were submitted to the handling of mercenaries. Scipio Africanus, despite the turmoil of battles, found time to shave every day; and he was the first Roman who did so. Had the Senate followed the same fashion, the invading Gaul would not have found a beard to pluck, and perhaps the city might have been saved. The old Persians were very obstinate in this respect; and they and the Tartars waged bloody wars, and spilled oceans of blood in no better quarrel than the fashion of the beard. These heathens were almost as wicked as the Christian inhabitants of the adjacent towns of Bouvignes and Dinant, in Flanders. The people of both localities manufactured copper kettles, and each declared that the other’s ware was made after a sorry fashion. The animosity thus created led to bloody and long-continued feuds; but peace was happily restored by the time that other towns had applied themselves to the manufacture, and this gave the old antagonists the more leisure to ruminate upon their own folly.