Such were the joys that once HILARIO crown’d,
Ere grave preferment came my peace to rob;
Such are the less ambitious pleasures found
Beneath the liceat of an humble Bob.”
But at Bath the clergy thought of other things beside divinity lectures and professorships. Anstey tells of a young spark of a clergyman sporting about in a more fashionable, but less canonical, coiffure than the grizzle-wig:
“What a cropt head of hair the young parson has on
Emerged from his grizzle, the unfortunate sprig
Seems as if he were hunting all night for his wig.”
Lely and Kneller could best illustrate the heroic age of wigs; but Hogarth’s ready pencil furnishes abundant details of their social state. The comic element seems to abound in all his sketches of wigs. In his print of “The Bench,” they slumber in the softest repose, in undisturbed gravity, and nod with the profoundest humour. The eminent lawyers were not all senior wranglers in those days. Look at the print of “The Country Dance,” and say if ever wigs hung more unbecomingly on the shoulders of the most awkward frights; but for an enormous pig-tail wig where could we select a finer specimen than in the print of “Taste in High Life.” These choice Exotics, as he has labelled them, are evidently great favourites with this humourous artist. But the print we are most concerned with is “The Five Orders of Periwigs, as they were worn at the late Coronation, measured Architectonically.” At the foot of the print the following advertisement is added:
In about 17 years will be completed, in 6 vols. folio, price 15 guineas. The exact measurements of the Periwigs of the Ancients, taken from the Statues, Bustos, and Basso-Relievos of Athens, Palmyra, Balbec, and Rome, by Modesto, Periwig-maker, from Lagado.