Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

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 23s. buys now a pair for £4. 10s.,—“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.