For many years wigs were worn of the natural colour of the hair, but about 1714 it became customary to have them bleached; this, however, was not found to answer, as they soon turned of a disagreeable shade, so that recourse was had to hair-powder, the use of which soon became general. At the accession of George 1st, it is mentioned that only two ladies wore hair-powder. White perukes were characteristic of the early Georgian era. About the same period we notice that one side only of the wig was frequently tied together into a sort of club which hung down upon the chest in a very lop-sided fashion. A few years later bag-wigs were in vogue; when first introduced in France they were only worn en déshabille; in a short time, however, they came to be regarded as the most essential part of the full-dress costume of a beau. The French bag-wig, as it was styled, when it first made its appearance among us, was called in ridicule a fan-tail, and said to resemble the winged cap of Mercury; the women likened the bag-wigs to asses’ ears, and the men retorted by allusion to the horns which were visible in a lady’s head-gear. The tu quoque has ever been the ready argument with both sexes.
Follies they have so numberless the store,
That only we who love them can have more.
In some satirical verses, published 1753, the contour of the wig, set off from the face, is clearly shown:
“Let a well-frizzled wig be set off from his face;
With a bag quite in taste, from Paris just come,
That was made and tied up by Monsieur Frisson;
With powder quite grey—then his head is complete;—”
The tie-wig, which Lord Bolingbroke helped to bring into fashion, was a very stiff and solid affair, as compared with the long curled perriwigs which preceded them. The curls appear as if hardened into rollers; and the pendant lumps of hair, looped and tied at the ends, as if modelled after the fashion of the proud horse-tails, turned up and bound with straw, at a fair. It would be as difficult to determine why such cumbrous wigs were tolerated without any beauty to recommend them, as to say why George I. chose such ugly German mistresses. Was it because, like certain kinds of old china, deformity was pleasing? The king’s favourites might possibly resemble the china, but the wigs were certainly not as frail. Horace Walpole has left us a lively description of Lord Sandwich’s tie-wig, in a letter to Sir H. Mann, 1745: “I would speak to our new ally, and your old acquaintance, Lord Sandwich, to assist in it; but I could have no hope of getting at his ear, for he has put on such a first-rate tie-wig, on his admission to the admiralty-board, that nothing without the lungs of a boatswain can ever think to penetrate the thickness of the curls. I think, however, it does honour to the dignity of ministers: when he was but a patriot, his wig was not of half its present gravity.” We have yet to notice the wig with the long queue, “small by degrees and beautifully less”—the drollest and most awkward of all additions to the human form since the long tails in Kent were inflicted on the men by a miracle, as a punishment for sticking fish tails to some monks’ garments.
“As I live!