—Virgil, Æneid, iv. 73.
XVIII. Manners in the Country
Motto. "The city they call Rome, I had been foolish enough, Melibæus, to suppose like this town of ours."—Virgil, Eclogues, i. 20.
[140]: 11. The fashionable world is grown free and easy. This tendency in manners began to be more marked after the Restoration, 1660. Some reaction toward a more formal and elaborate courtesy in the world of fashion could be seen about the middle of the eighteenth century, under the influence of such men as Lord Chesterfield.
For some account of manners in the Queen Anne time, see Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, Chaps. vii, viii; Trail's Social England, Chaps. xvi, xvii. For telling contemporary satire, see Swift's Polite Conversation.
[143]: 2. Red coats and laced hats were fashionable twenty years before Addison was writing. In 1711 the coat was likely to be of some more quiet color, though in great variety of shades. At just this time the skirts were "wired" to make them stand out—as may be seen by a reference in Spectator, No. 145. The laced hat had been replaced by a low-crowned, black felt hat, with very wide brim, which was looped up or "cocked." For the variety of shapes into which the dandy would cock his hat, and other information on the hat, see Spectator, No. 319.
143: 4. The height of their head-dresses. The head-dress had evidently been much lowered within a few years. Addison, in Spectator, No. 98, declares that "within my own memory I have known it rise and fall about thirty degrees." In the latter half of the century, about 1775, it again attained proportions even more startling than in Addison's day.
XIX. Sir Roger at the Assizes
Motto. "A jovial companion on the way is as good as a carriage."—Publius Syrus, Maxims.