The wretch, who living saved a candle’s end;
Shouldering God’s altar a vile image stands,
Belies his features, nay extends his hands;
That live-long wig which Gorgon’s self might own,
Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.”
Pope’s own note to the last line reads: “Ridicule the wretched taste of carving large periwigs on bustos, of which there are several vile examples among the tombs of Westminster and elsewhere.” Pope’s real victim, Hopkins, was “Vulture” Hopkins, who died in his house in Broad Street in 1732, leaving a fortune of £300,000 with peculiar conditions attached. Several thousand pounds were expended on his funeral.
[396] Thomas Dawson, Viscount—not Earl—of Cremorne, died 1813.
[397] The full-dress wigs of English judges are the nearest survival of the great Queen Anne wigs familiar in the portraits of these men. They are made of white horse hair, elaborately treated.
[398] Combing the wig in the theatre and the drawing-room was a habit, like twirling the moustache. Dryden pictures the wits rising as one man in the pit of the theatre and beginning to comb their wigs while they stared at a new masked beauty. “It became the mark of a young man of ton to be seen combing his periwig in the Mall, or at the theatre” (Fairholt: Costume in England). Hats were not worn on perukes that cost forty or fifty pounds. In Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1672) we read: “A lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke.”
[399] It is said that, as a rule, Lely’s male portraits of the Charles II. period can be distinguished at once from Kneller’s portraits of the Court of William III., by observing that in the former the ends of the wig descend on the chest, in the latter they fall behind the shoulders.