The ladies were uncommonly angry with their liege mistress Anne for this decree, and the sentiment is exemplified by the song so popular at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre in 1704,—‘The Misses’ Lamentation, for want of their Vizard Masques at the Theatre.’ The “misses” however, and the matrons too, had long before this indulged in a fashion which was not dropped until long subsequent to the fall of the mask.
About five years after Mrs. Pepys had taken Samuel for her liege lord, that is to say in 1660, she first essayed to add new lustre to her charms by affixing a few “beauty spots” to her face. “This is the first day,” says he, on the 30th of August of the year above named, “that ever I saw my wife wear black patches since we were married.” It was some time before the gentleman could make up his mind to the propriety of wearing these adjuncts to beauty. In October, he expresses his astonishment that even Lord Sandwich should “talk very high how he would have a French cook, and a master of his horse, and his lady and child to wear black patches; which methought was strange, but he has become a perfect courtier.” It was perhaps because the court patronized patches, that Pepys permitted them on his wife. Hitherto the lady had worn them without the marital sanction, but in November we find him saying, “My wife seemed very pretty today, it being the first time I had given her leave to weare a black patch.” And therewith his admiration increased; and some days later, on seeing his wife close to the Princess Henrietta (daughter of Charles I.) at court, on the occasion of a visit she paid to her brother Charles II., as Duchess of Orléans, he remarks: “The Princess Henrietta is very pretty; ... but my wife standing near her, with two or three black patches on, and well-dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she.”
A century subsequent to this, patches still kissed the cheek of beauty; and as professors taught how to wield the fan, so French essays were “done into English,” and instruction therein given as to the secret of applying them in an artful manner, how to arrange them with the most killing effect, and how to so plant them about the eye that the expression desired should be at once achieved,—whether of proud disdain, amorous languor, or significant boldness. They were the hieroglyphics of vanity and of party spirit; and beaux and politicians read in the arrangement of patches not only the tender but the political principles of the wearer.
Despotism too had something to do with patches. Thus Lady Castlemaine fixed the fashion of mourning, by “forcing all the ladies to go in black, with their hair plain, and without spots.” It is a curious trait of the manners of other times that a royal concubine should order the tiring of honest women. She could hardly have influenced that “comely woman,” the Duchess of Newcastle, who went about, in the second Charles’s time, with a velvet cap, her hair about her ears, “many black patches, because of pimples about her mouth,” naked-necked, and in a black justaucorps.
The ladies marked or patched, the gentlemen red-heeled and similarly “nosed,” had no greater delight than in killing time by looking at the “puppets;” and the fashion of these same puppets is a thing of such antiquity and such duration, that I may fairly add a chapter thereon to those through which I have already been accompanied by the courteous and indulgent reader.
PUPPETS FOR GROWN GENTLEMEN.
“They do lie in a basket, Sir; they are o’ the small players,—and as good as any, none dispraised, for dumb shows.”—Ben Jonson: Bartholomew Fair.
Madame de Puysieux was a witty and vivacious lady. Among her recorded sayings is one that exceedingly well suits me for the nonce. “I would rather,” she said, “be occasionally found looking at puppets than listening to philosophers.”
There was doubtless some reason in this; but the fact is also indubitable, that puppets and philosophy are not so far apart. The latter has often condescended to illustrate the former. The learned and serious Jesuit, Mariantonio Lupi, devoted his brief leisure to writing upon them. The great mathematicians, Commendino d’Urbino and Torniano di Cremona, stooped to play with and perfect them. Le Sage and Piron wrote plays for them. Ben Jonson brought them on the stage. Addison has immortalized them in stately verse; and Haydn seriously addressed himself to composing exquisite music, wherewith to grace their motion. These are but modern illustrations. We shall however presently discover, that the great and gifted men of a very remote antiquity were wont also to turn from the consideration of mighty problems, and carve puppets that should excite ecstasy in the wide world of “the little people.”