Old ladies continued for some time longer to adhere to the huge head-dresses, which supplied Lady Wortley Montague with a bit of raillery for her “Town Eclogues:”
At chapel shall I wear the morn away?
Who there appears at these unmodish hours
But ancient matrons with their frizzled towers.
Queen Anne in the latter years of her reign wore her hair in a simple, graceful style, well suited to her quiet nature, with clusters of curls at the back of the neck; nor was any hair-powder permitted to sully the brightness of her chesnut ringlets. Her sweet voice seems still to plead for her with posterity, and to be remembered with something like affection, when the splendid victories of the great Marlborough are losing somewhat of their lustre on the page of history. The fruits of industry and the blessings of peace are too precious to be weighed against the glories of war. But, who can look at the portraits of Marlborough, with the long curls of the wig resting on the cuirass, without feeling there was truth in the saying of a foreigner, “That his looks were full as conquering as his sword.”
How to wear a wig was part of the education of a man of the world, not to be learned from books. Those who know what witchcraft there is in the handling of a fan, what dexterity in the “nice conduct of a clouded cane,” will imagine the wits and gentlemen of old did not suffer the wig to overshadow their temples with perpetual gloom, like the wreath of smoke which overhangs our Modern Babylon. And many a country squire must have tried in vain to catch the right toss of the head; to sport a playful humour in those crisp curls; or to acquire the lofty carriage of the foretop, or the significant trifling with some obtrusive lock; and felt as awkward in his new wig as a tailor on horseback, or a fat alderman with a dress sword dangling between his legs. There must have been something truly ridiculous in the prostrations of the perriwig-pated fop, who
Returns the diving bow he did adore,
Which with a shag casts all the hair before,
Till he with full decorum brings it back,
And rises with a water-spaniel shake.