With Brabant buttons—all my given pieces,
Except my gloves, the natives of Madrid.”
Over against such a strange human specimen as is thus pictured in the imagination, we may well set the women of the time, as painted, rouged, highly scented, bejewelled, bewigged, in French hoods, starched Cambric ruffs, close-fitting jerkins, and embroidered velvet gowns, they look down upon us from the walls of many an Elizabethan house, and fill the busy scene in many a contemporary play. Women, Lyly thought—so far had the artifices of the toilet carried them,—were in reality the least part of themselves. Some of their freaks of fashion in particular drew down the ire alike of the playwright and of the more serious satirist. One was the habit of painting the face, so frequently referred to by Shakspere and others. A second was the very common practice of wearing false hair, treated at length, along with nearly all similar extravagances of the period, by the irrepressible Stubbs. Every reader of Shakspere will recall the passage from Bassanio’s moralizings on “outward shows,” in which this fashion is alluded to:—
“Look on beauty,
And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it;
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known