Benedict, describing the woman of his choice, says, "her hair shall be of what colour it please God[92:B];" an oblique stroke at a very prevalent fashion in Shakspeare's time of colouring or dying the hair, and which, from its general adoption, not only excited the shaft of the satirist, but the reprobation of the pulpit. Nor were the ladies content with disfiguring their own hair, but so universally dismissed it for that of others, that it was a common practice with them, as Stubbes asserts in his Anatomie of Abuses, to allure children who had beautiful hair to private places, in order to deprive them of their envied locks.
That the dead were frequently rifled for this purpose, our poet has told us in more places than one; thus, in his sixty-eighth sonnet, he says—
—— "the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head,
'And' beauty's dead fleece made another gay;"
and he repeats the charge in his Merchant of Venice,—
"So are those crisped snaky golden locks,
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known