dusty, toilsome days, but it was wonderfully
beautiful—shoulder-knots, loose shirts, slashed
sleeves, ribboned breeches, jaunty cloaks,
feathered caps, rich ruffs and falling bands of
daintiest lace, gauntlet gloves—everything, in
short, save the flowing periwig of dead men's
hair, which yet harmonised so well with all the
rest. From the turned-down boot of Cavalier
and Puritan, we come to the stiff jack-boot of
James the Second and the highwaymen; and
then to the red heels of the dandies of Queen
Anne's liking, when various Sir Plumes minced by
the side of our great-great-grandmothers at
Ranelagh, the beautiful young women in hoops
and patches, tottering gracefully on crimson heels
set well under the foot, with bows and buckles
worth a fortune on the instep. And then was
invented the pump or flat shoe, with no heels at
all, as we wear them now in-doors; and then,
in a little time longer, the buckle-makers set up
a loud cry, and petitioned the Prince of Wales
to insist on the British nation wearing buckles,
for it was running wild into bad taste and
sobriety, and they, the buckle-makers, were
starving. And now, last of all, is our modern
revival of high heels, not yet coloured red, and
the fond ambition of our fashionable girls to
appear in boots originally copied from the
pattern of a railway navvy's, but baptised into
refinement by the name of Balmorals.

Hair and head-dresses come next; in fact,
they ought to have come first, before boots and
shoes and everything else, for they are the most
wild and wonderful of all the wild and wonderful
things man has from time to time fashioned for
his disfigurement. The old painted Britons wore
long hair falling to the shoulders in grand massy
lengths, a trifle the worse for want of combs
and brushes; and the fashion continued, with
one or two temporary shortenings, to the time
of Henry the Sixth, when it was cut close and
round, like a charity-school boy's round a
basin. Henry the Seventh brought back the
older fashion. Henry the Eighth cut closer.
The Cavaliers wore long love-locks, meandering
over their shoulders as low as the elbow; while
the stricter Puritans preached against the mode,
and some of them cropped themselves close as
shorn sheep. But the nobler sort wore theirs
long, straight, and parted down the middle,
though they were held near to perdition by the
saints for the same. Charles the Second
patronised periwigs, first brought into England in
the time of Henry the Eighth, which monarch
spent twenty shillings on a perwyke for Sexton,
his fool; and from Charles to the youthful days
of our own papas, wigs of all shapes have had a
long reign over the world of fashion, if not a
handsome one. Marvellous were the various
forms of these periwigs. Huge Cape-sheep tails
tied with monstrous blue bows; long flows of
wool, pluffy and full, flapping down to the waist,
like exaggerated spaniels' ears, things large
enough for a camel's load, and bearing a bushel
of powder; campaigns, bobs, pigtails, bags,
toupees, like sugar-loaves, both male and female,
the male with a row of cannon curls at the nape of
the neck, the female bordered to the apex of the
pyramid with rolls like Brobdingnagian sausages:
pigeons' wings, comets, and cauliflowers, royal
birds, staircases, ladders, and brushes, wild boars'
backs, temples, rhinoceroses, corded wolf's paws,
Count Saxe's mode, the dragons, the rose, the
crutch, the negligent, the chancellor, the cut
bob, the long bob, and the Jansenist bob, the
half natural, the chain buckle and the corded
buckle, the drop wig, the snail's back, spinage
seed, and artichoke, were a few of the names
given to these creations of tow, powder, and
nastiness. Dandies combed their perukes in
the streets and public places, and to do so
gracefully and with the proper air was a matter of
grave education. A wig-maker wrote over a
picture of Absalom and David, which served as
his sign,

               O Absalom! O Absalom!
                  O Absalom my son!
               If thou hadst worn a periwig,
                  Thou hadst not been undone!

Louis the Fifteenth tied a bit of black ribbon
loosely round his neck, and fastened it in a bow
to his pigtail behind, then called it a solitaire,
and not the least distinctive mark of the later
French revolutionists was their manner of dressing
the hair. Also, they adopted the hideous
chimney-pot, which has survived better things.
The head-coverings were as strange as the heads.
In olden times the men wore hoods with long
tails called liripipes, which they wound round
their heads like a turban in many bands, or
swathes; then they wore caps with high feathers,
and round felt hats like our wide-awakes, and
close skull-caps surmounted with a heap of
jagged and cut cointoise furbelows falling in a
confused mass of intentional rags about the
head and neck—a fashion perpetuated in the
Garter Knights' hoods, now slung over the
shoulder; and they wore peaked hats with
feathers, and peaked hats without feathers, scarlet
caps, and the close-fitting beretta, chimney-pots
of taffetas and velvets, with a couple of feathers
curled like the tail of the lyre bird of Paradise,
and broad brims and funnels, and broad brims
and peaked crowns, and jaunty looped brims
with soft drooping feathers, as in the days of
Charles the Second, and cocked-hats edged
with feathers, and cocked-hats edged with
gold lace, and the original chimney-pots of the
Revolution; and the hideous chimney-pots of
1860, and the wide-awakes for artists, and pork-
pies for flashy young men, and cricket-caps, and
boating-caps, and a host of others: but always
the head covering of respectability and state—
the high, ugly, cylindrical chimney-pot at seventeen-
and-sixpence, best quality.

But the women outvied the men in the
exaggeration of their head-gear. In early times, the
times of knight and squire and historic fable, they
plaited their hair into long pendent tails, which
they then put up snugly into silken cases, not
unlike our umbrella cases; a little later, in Chaucer's
time, they wore cauls of golden network adorned
with jewels, and every woman with any pretensions
to beauty had yellow hair, which she dyed