Or one that at the gallows made her will,
Late chokéd with the hangman’s pickadill;
In which respect a sow, a cat, a mare,
More modest than these foolish females are;
For the brute beasts, (continual night and day,)
Do wear their own still, (and so do not they.)”
Pennant had a strange aversion to wigs, and, when he was half seas over, used to snatch them off the wearers’ heads. Once, at Chester, dining with an officer and a personal friend, (who, knowing his particular weakness, purposely sat next him, to prevent mischief,) being somewhat elated with wine, he made a sudden dart at the officer’s wig and threw it into the fire. The officer, enraged at the insult, drew his sword, and Pennant took to his heels. The son of Mars was close upon him when Pennant’s better knowledge of the bye-ways of Chester stood him in good stead, and he contrived to give the enemy the slip. His friend, who remembered all the particulars of this hair-breadth escape, used to call it Pennant’s Tour in Chester.
When Fag, in Sheridan’s play of “The Rivals,” meets Sir Anthony’s coachman at Bath, he tells him he must polish a little, and that “none of the London whips of any degree of ton wear wigs now.” But the bucolic mind is eminently conservative, and Thomas makes answer, “Odd’s life! when I heard how the lawyers and doctors had took to their own hair, I thought how ’twould go next. Why, bless you, the gentlemen of the professions ben’t all of a mind; for in our village now, thoff Jack Gauge, the exciseman, has ta’en to his carrots; there’s little Dick, the farrier, swears he’ll never forsake his bob, though all the college should appear with their own heads.”
It was during the first shock of the French Revolution, when the laws, religion, and social institutions of France were overturned, as by an earthquake, that wigs were discarded with other insignia of the old régime. The heroes of pagan Rome, and the fabled deities of Greece, supplied the French Republicans with models for their newest fashions. The men with rough cropped hair sported a Brutus, and the ladies in scanty draperies assumed the coiffure à la Greque. While the heroic citizens rejoiced in their newly acquired liberty and freedom from wigs, the chaste matrons went in search of false hair, to imitate the classic beauties of antiquity. In England, however sudden the transformations in high life, the change, agreeably to the genius of the people, was rather the growth of a new system than the uprooting of the old. The old wig decayed slowly beside the growth of a new crop, and lingered long in many a humble circle, became the oracle of the club, and enjoyed the dignity of the arm-chair and the repose of the chimney-corner; and some would be laid up in ordinary with family relics in the old lumber-room, like Uncle Toby’s white Ramillies wig in the old campaign trunk, which the corporal put into pipes and furbished up for the grand coup de main with widow Wadman, but which resisted all Trim’s efforts, and the repeated application of candle-ends, to bring into better curl.
It chanced that Queen Charlotte’s auburn locks fell off during her accouchment. At this fatal omen the extravagant head-dresses then in fashion were suddenly sacrificed. Her majesty and the princesses in 1793 were pleased to discard hair-powder, which speedily rid the beau monde of that encumbrance. In 1795 the hair-powder tax of one guinea per head, imposed by Pitt’s act, came into operation. The tax at one time realized as much as £20,000 per annum. This lessened considerably the number of powdered heads; and hair-powder, once so necessary to the finish of the finest gentleman, fell into disuse, except with a few gentlemen’s gentlemen—the Fitz-Jeames in livery.