Lest from his shoulders clouds of powder fly.”
While the coarser sex revelled in all the luxury of full perriwigs, we may be sure the fair sex bestowed as great attention on their hair. If enterprises of great moment were undertaken by the wigs, there was fearful slaughter of human hearts from the masked batteries of the ladies’ smiles. In “Love’s Bill of Mortality,” given at length in the Spectator, we read of one, “Jack Freelove, murdered by Melissa in her hair.”
“The toilet,” says Addison, “is their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives.”
“At her toilet she puts on every toy
That ladies use when eager to destroy;
Three hours by the clock, (and some say four),
She sat in polishing her form all o’er,
And culling arrows from her fatal store.”
The resources of a lady’s toilet were too numerous to be brought within the compass of Cowley’s verse. He declines
“To relate