If men disfigured themselves with wigs, the women heightened their charms, as they believed, by sticking little bits of black taffeta on their faces. The fashion began in the Commonwealth, when ladies began to cut out stars, circles, and even figures representing a coach and four, and stick them upon their cheek, forehead, or chin:—
“Her patches are of every cut,
For pimples and for scars;
Here’s all the wandering planets’ signs,
And some of the fixed stars.”
Like the fashion of the wig, the patch lasted more than a hundred years. Indeed, it lasted even into the nineteenth century. And in 1826, a lady, speaking of a toilet-table, speaks of the patch-boxes upon it. This proves, I take it, that the patch-box still retained its position on the table, though the use of it had been abandoned. I have one of these patch-boxes; it is of silver, about the same size as a snuff-box, but a great deal deeper.
Ladies painted as well as patched. They prepared their faces for the paint with oil. The page—The Silent Woman—says that “my lady kisses me with her oil’d face and puts a peruke on my head.” They seem all to have worn a peruke. Mrs. Otter, according to her husband, has a peruke “like a pound of hemp, made up in shoe threads.” They understood the art of making up. “Her teeth were made on the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street.... She takes herself asunder when she goes to bed into some twenty boxes; and about noon next day is put together again like a great German clock.”
In walking with a lady the custom was to take her fan and play with it for her. A fine gentleman displayed his fashion and his grace by the way he handled and waved the fan.
There was a pretty custom observed by gentlefolk on the 1st of May. The maypoles had been restored, but the old dances were well-nigh forgotten. The people on this day flocked to Hyde Park; but gentlemen escorted their mistresses into the country to bid welcome to the spring. There was always a collation in the seventeenth century to mark the day or the function, whichever it was.
