ROBERT DEVEREUX, SECOND EARL OF ESSEX.
Engraved by William Rogers.
To return to our diagrams. No. 6, a further narrowing of the top of the crown, represents the quaint extinguisher hats which have been worn at various periods, and which are still worn by the Welsh peasantry.
"There came up a Lass from a country town, intending to live in the City,
In a steeple-crown Hat and a Paragon Gown, who thought herself wondrous pretty;
Her Petticoat serge, her Stockings were green, her Smock cut out of a sheet, Sir;
And under it all, was seldom yet seen so fair a young maid for the street, Sir!"
Roxburghe Ballads, 1685.
By lowering the crown and widening the brim we arrive at the sombrero, No. 7.
The slouch hat turned up on one side, of the Stuart period, was the precursor, historically and decoratively, of the three-cornered hat of the period of the House of Orange. It was afterwards turned up on two sides, and in this stage decorated with feathers, and finally turned up at the back, thus forming the three-cornered hat, which lasted for a century, the feathers disappearing, and the edges trimmed with lace. Such turning up of the brim was called "cocking" the hat.
The different modes of cocking the hat were almost innumerable—in fact, according to the fancy of the wearer; there was the "Monmouth cock," after the unfortunate Duke of that name; the "Ramillie cock," which came in at the Battle of Ramillies in 1706; the military cock and the mercantile cock; and upon the accession of George III. (1760) "a hat worn upon an average six inches and three-fifths broad in the brim, and cocked between Quaker and Kevenhuller."
"When Anna ruled, and Kevenhuller fought,
The hat its title from the Hero caught."
Art of Dressing the Hair, 1770.
From a chapter on hats in the London Chronicle for 1762 we learn that—"Some wear their hats with the corner that should come over their foreheads high in the air; these are the Gawkies. Others do not above half cover their heads, which is, indeed, owing to the shallowness of their crowns; but, between beaver and eyebrows, expose a blank forehead, which looks like a sandy road in a surveyor's plan.... A gold button and loop to a plain hat distinguishes a person to be a little lunatic; a gold band round it shows the owner to be very dangerously infected; and if a tassel is added, the patient is incurable. A man with a hat larger than common represents the fable of the mountain in labour, and the hats edged round with a gold binding belong to brothers of the turf."