"It was once the fashion to have two curls of equal size, stuck at the same height close upon the forehead, which probably took its rise from seeing the pretty effect of curls falling loosely over the face.
"A lock of hair falling thus across the temples, and by that means breaking the regularity of the oval, has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent, as is very well known to the loose and lowest classes of women; but being paired in so stiff a manner as they formerly were, they lost the desired effect, and ill deserved the name of ornaments."
Moralists of different nations have considered hair as calculated to entangle hearts, and one of our pious writers of the last century wrote a furious treatise on the unloveliness of love-locks.
[6] A chair kicked down, an Essay on Whist, cards scattered on the floor, and the general confusion of everything in the room, seem to intimate that this right honourable society were actuated by passions somewhat similar to those which inflame the gentlemen in the sixth plate of "The Rake's Progress." Though a genuine gamester is not apt to lose his presence of mind on slight occasions, yet when a man of rank is stripped of sums that will draw into their vortex many anticipated years of his revenue, he is liable to lose his temper, and on such occasions apt to vent his spleen on inanimate objects. Such things sometimes happen even now.
[7] Absurd as this may seem, yet until Mr. Wedgwood introduced those beautiful Etruscan forms which now decorate the rooms, and form the taste of the possessors, these shapeless monsters disgraced the most splendid apartments in the metropolis.
[8] "Kent was not only consulted for furniture, as frames of pictures, glasses, tables, chairs, etc., but for plate, for a barge, for a cradle. So impetuous was fashion, that two great ladies prevailed on him to make designs for their birthday gowns. The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in copper-coloured satin, with ornaments of gold."—Walpole's Anecdotes, 2d edit., vol. iv. p. 239.
[9] This race still roll round the metropolis; and while some put their trust in chariots, horses, and impudence, others depend on the credulity of his Majesty's liege subjects.
The following epitaph was written for one of them:—
Beneath lies lean old Fillgrave, once M.D.,
Who hunger felt much oft'ner than a fee;