baldness, as those ingredients would supply to the blood the materials necessary for the production of hirsute growths. Those who have bad taste enough to obliterate with hairdye the silvery livery of age should at least keep in mind the horrible position in which Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse found himself, whose carrots were turned into a lively green; they should also be informed that nitrate of silver is the chief ingredient of all the preparations, which in most cases act by entirely altering the cortical portion of the hair. Once a month, at shortest, we of the male sex are, by the exigencies of fashion, obliged to submit our heads to the tender mercies of the executioner. Swathed in wrappers of Enter JONES, meeting OILY the barber. Pray, sir, take a seat. Jones. They were. Oily. If there is nothing I can show you, sir. Jones. No nothing. : Yet there may be something, too, That you may show me. Oily. Jones. Name it, sir. The door. [Exit JONES. Oily (to his man). That's a rum customer at Had I cut him as short as he cut me, [Shop-bell rings and curtain falls. Touching upon the subject of applications for nourishing the hair, we must not omit the most important and imposing, though some Oily. I hoped fair weather might have people imagine perfectly apocryphal, con Until the end. lasted us Jones. At one time-80 did I. Oily. But we have had it very wet. Jones. We have. [A pause of some minutes. tributors-Bears. We know Bruin has of late been declared a humbug, and there is but too prevalent an opinion abroad that he does not let his genuine grease flow for the benefit of mankind as freely as barbers would have us believe from the announcement we so often see Oily. I know not, sir, who cut your hair last in back streets of another bear to be killed." time; But this I say, sir, it was badly cut: No doubt 't was in the country. No! in town! room. Oily. Amazement! but I now remember well. Jones (looking at him). No-'t was yourself. Jones. I don't mistake't was you that cut [A long pause, interrupted only by the After full inquiry, however, we find that Bruin still bleeds without murmuring for an ungrateful public. During the winter months upwards of fifty bears yield up the ghost in this metropolis alone, and they are we find St. Petersburg and London. The destiny of very regular passengers between the ports of these creatures affords a singular instance of the manner in which extremes meet-the shaggy denizen of a Russian forest having at last the honor of yielding up his precious fat irresistible Puseyite. If Ursa Major could to make glossy and smooth the ringlets of an only know his distinguished future! In order to combat the growing scepticism as to "hairdressers' bears," a worthy son of the craft in the neighborhood of St. Giles' Church was long in the habit, when he slaughtered a Muscovite, of hanging him by chains out of the second-floor window, with an inscription to the effect that customers bringing their own gallipots might cut the fat out for themselves. The history of the coiffure commenced, we suppose, when Eve, first gazing on a brook (not far from the Tree), discovered the dishevelled condition of her head-gear. As far back as we have any records of man, we find a more or less elaborate fashion of dressing the hair. As we have said before, the Nineveh statues and relievos show us how justly the old Hebrew prophets describe and rebuke the dandyism of Sennacherib's captains and counsellors. A modern Truefitt with all his skill must wonder as he gazes upon those exquisite plaitings, and bossings, and curlings which extended over the beard as well as the head of the Assyrian. A glimpse at the wig found in the temple of Isis at Thebes, and now, as has also been mentioned, among the glories of the Museum, proves that the Egyptians, of even an earlier epoch, probably, were most studious of their toilet. The Greeks, however, with their innate love of the beautiful, carried the arrangement of the hair to the highest point of artistic excellence. The marbles which have come down to us testify to this perfection, and after a lapse of eighteen hundred years all the nations of Christendom, discarding their own hideous devices, have returned with more or less scrupulousness to the models so bequeathed. The Roman dames speedily overlaid the simple beauty of the Greek mode, piled upon their heads imitations of castles and crowns, hoisted their hair in intricate wreaths, and knotted it with a tiresome elaborateness. The men generally showed better taste and continued to sport sharp crisp locks after the manner of "the curled Antony," sometimes with the addition of the beard, sometimes without it. By and by, however, among other signs of decadence, the simple male coiffure was thrown aside for more luxurious fashions, and the Emperor Commodus for one is said to have powdered his hair with gold. the dark ages, was very much respected; and at the beginning of the French monarchy the people chose their kings by the length of their locks. In our own island it was equally esteemed and so far from its being considered a mark of effeminacy to carefully tend it, we are told that the Danish officers who were quartered upon the English in the reign of Ethelred the Unready won the hearts of the ladies by the length and beauty of their hair, which they combed at least once a-day. The clergy seem to have been the only class of men who wore the hair short, and this they did as a kind of mortification. Not content with exercising this virtue themselves, however, they attempted to impose it upon the laity. Thus St. Anselm fulminated orders against long hair, both in England and France. There was a kind of hair which received the honor of a special canon denouncing it. This hair, crisped by art, was styled by them the malice of the Devil. The following represents in modernized form, of course in which the French bishops anathematized it : - the terms Prenant un soin paternel de punir, autant qu'il est à propos, ceux qui portent des cheveux frisés et bouclés par artifice, pour faire tomber dans le piége les personnes qui les voient, nous les exhortons et leur enjoignons de vivre plus modestement, en sorte qu'on ne remarque plus en eux aucuns restes de la malice du diable. Si quelqu'un pèche contre ce canon, qu'il soit excommunié! Indeed, so many and such complicated and contradictory ordinances were issued by like authority about the seventh and eighth centuries, that some wag suggested that the young fellows should continue to wear their hair long until the church had settled what short hair really was. In England the clergy did not confine themselves merely to denouncing the flowing tresses of the nobility; impregnated with the practical turn of mind of the country, they acted as well as talked. Thus Serlo, a Norman prelate, preaching before Henry II. and his court, brought the whole party to such a state of repentance respecting the profligate length of their locks, that they consented to give them up, whereupon the crafty churchman pulled a pair of shears out of his sleeve, and secured his victory by clearing the. royal head in a twinkling. Such occasional results of pious impulse were, however, of little avail; on the whole, the abomination remained throughout the early reigns of both France and England quite triumphant. In Richard II.'s time the men as well as the women confined the hair over the brow with a fillet. What the clergy, with all their threats of excommunication and Outside of Rome, long hair was generally prevalent among freemen. The slaves were invariably cropped, and Cæsar relates that he always ordered the populations of the provinces he had conquered to shave off their hair as a sign of their subjection. In the decline of the empire, when any of these provinces revolted, the insurgent captains directed the masses to wear their hair long again, as a signal of recovered freedom. Thus the haircrops of whole countries were alternately mown and allowed to grow like so many fields at the command of the husbandman -the most important of facts political being indicated (we despise the vile imputation of a pun)-promises of paradise, could not effect in a by the state of the poll. Long hair, during series of ages, was at last brought about by an The virulence with which the Puritans de With the renewed triumph of long hair the beard gradually shrank up; first assuming a forked appearance, then dwindling to a peak, and ultimately vanishing altogether. The female coiffure of the Stuart period was peculiarly pleasing: clustering glossy curls, which were sometimes made soft and semi-transparent by a peculiar friz, gave life and movement to the face; whilst a pretty arrangement of loops hung like a fringe across the forehead, and added a great air of quaintness to the whole expression. accident. Francis I., having been wounded of the barber for having to make him such a in the head at a tournament, was obliged to foole. have his hair cropped, whereupon the whole of fashionable France gave up their locks out. of compliment to the sovereign. In the His-nounced long hair even exceeded that of the tory of England, illustrated with woodcuts of priests of old. Diseases of the hair were lugthe kings heads, which we have all of us ged in as evidences of the divine displeasure; thumbed over so at school, the sudden and for example, the worthy divine we have just complete change in the method of wearing the been quoting talks of plica polonica as unhair between the installation of the Tudor questionably resulting from the wickedness dynasty and the meridian of bluff King Hal of the times. There is a cat afflicted with must be well remembered. The portraits of this singular hair-disease in the Museum of the latter period by Holbein are, however, the the College of Surgeons, so we suppose that best of illustrations. The women, as well as race at the present time are living profligate lives! the men, appear almost totally deprived of What says Professor Owen? hair, and we cannot help thinking that much of the hard expression of features, which especially marks the female heads of Henry VIII.'s great painter, was owing to the withdrawal of the softening influence of the hair. The close cropping of the gentlemen, on the other hand, gave them a virile aspect which especially suited with the reforming spirit of the age. As the hair shortened, the beard was allowed to flow. Indeed, this compensatory process has always obtained; in no age, we think, have the hair and beard been allowed to grow long at the same time. Shakspeare was constantly alluding to the beard. In his day this term included the three more modern subdivisions of beard, moustache, and whisker - they were all then worn in one. "Did he not wear a great round beard like a glover's paring-knife?" asks one of his characters, clearly alluding to the extent of cheek it covered. In a word, the period par excellence of magnificent barbes comprised the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century-and, as a matter of course, there was at the same time manifested the germ of that party which gave a politico-religious character to the hair of the revolutionary epoch. The Cavaliers began to restore long locks early in the reign of Charles I.; the Puritans, so far from adopting the fashion, polled even closer than before, and at last came to rejoice in the cognomen of Roundheads. Between these two grand extremes, however, there were innumerable other fashions of wearing the hair, the minor ensigns, we suppose, of trimming sectaries. Dr. Hall, who published a little work in 1643, On the Loathsomnesse of Long Hair," exclaims How strangely do men cut their hairs- some all before, some all behind, some long round about, their crownes being cut short like cootes or popish priests and friars; some have long locks at their eares, as if they had foure eares, or were prickeared; some have a little long lock onely before, hanging downe to their noses, like the taile of a weasall; every man being made a foole at the barber's pleasure, or making a foole But how shall we approach with sufficient awe the solemn epoch of perukes! It is true we have sufficient evidence that the Egypt of Pharaoh was not ignorant of the wig- the very corpus delicti is familiar to our eyes and many busts and statues in the Vatican have actually marble wigs at this hour upon them clearly indicating the same fact in the days of imperial Rome. But, apart from these very ancient matters, which are comparatively new discoveries, hitherto our attention has been claimed by the simple manipulations of the barber; we now enter upon a period when the dressing of hair rises into a real science, and the perruquier with a majestic bearing takes the dignity of a professor. To France, of course, we owe the reïnvention and complete adoption of a head-dress which sacrificed the beauty of nature to the delicacies of art. The epidemic broke out in the reign of Louis XIII. This prince never from his childhood cropped his hair, and the peruke was invented to enable those to whom nature had not been so bountiful in the item of flowing locks to keep themselves in the mode brought in by their royal master. In England the introduction of these portentous headdresses is well marked in Pepys' Diary. Under date November 3, 1663, he says Home, and by and bye comes Chapman, the perriwigg-maker, and upon my liking it (the wig), without more ado I went up, and then be cut off my haire, which went a little to my heart at present to part with it; but it being over, and my perriwigg on, I paid him 37., and away went he with my own haire to make up another of; and I by and bye went abroad, after I had caused all my maids to look upon it, and they concluded it do become me, though Jane was mightily troubled for my parting with my own hair, and BO was Besse. November 8, 1663. Lord's Day.-To church, where I found that my coming in a perriwigg did not prove so strange as I was afraid it would, for I thought that all the church would presently have cast their eyes upon me, but I find no such things. The natural vanity of the fair sex struggled with more or less success against the loss of their own hair, but they managed to friz and ribbons that it at lengh excelled the male build this up with such piles of lace and peruke. In 1760, when they had reached a truly monstrous altitude, one Legros had the extraordinary impudence to hint that the things was getting beyond a joke, and proposed a return to the" coiffure à la Grecque." From this last extract it would appear, that For a moment the fair mob of fashion listened, in the beginning the peruke, made as it was and the hair-dressers trembled, for well they from the natural hair, was not very different knew that, if the women hesitated, the mode, from the Cavalier mode. The imagination of like their virtue, would be lost. Accordingly France speedily improved, however, upon poor they combined with immense force against old Dame Nature. Under Louis XIV. the size Legros, instituted a lawsuit, and speedily to which perukes had grown was such, that crushed him. This momentary blight rethe face appeared only as a small pimple in the moved, the female head-dress sprang up still midst of a vast sea of hair. The great archi- more madly than before, and assumed an abtect of this triumphant age of perukes was struseness of construction hitherto unexone Binette, an artist of such note and conse-ampled. The author of the "Secret Memoirs" quence that without him the king and all his relates that Queen Marie Antoinette herself courtiers were nothing. His equipage and invented a coiffure which represented all the running footmen were seen at every door, and refinements of landscape gardening" des he might have adopted without much assump-collines, des prairies émaillées, des ruisseaux tion the celebrated mot of his royal master argentins et des torrents écumeux, des jardins -L'état c'est moi. The clergy, physicians, symétriques, et des parcs Anglais." From and lawyers speedily adopted the peruke, as the altitude of the head-dresses in 1778 it they imagined it gave an imposing air to the was found that they intercepted the view of countenance, and so indeed it must be con- spectators in the rear of them at the Opera, fessed it did. One can never look at the por- and the director was obliged to refuse admittraits of the old bishops and judges dressed in tance to the amphitheatre to those persons the full-bottomed flowing peruke without a who wore such immoderate coiffures a prosort of conviction that the originals must have ceeding which reminds us of the joke of Jack been a deal more profound and learned than Reeve, who, whilst manager of the Adelphi, those of our own close-cropped age. So im- posted a notice that, in consequence of the pressed was the Grand Monarque with the crowded state of the house, gentlemen fremajestic character it lent to the face, that he quenting the pit must shave off their whiskers! never appeared without his peruke before his Such was the art expended on these tremenattendants, and it was the necessity, perhaps, dous head-dresses, and such a detail required of taking it off at the latest moment of the in their different stages, that ladies of quality toilet, that caused him to say that no man were often under the hands of the artiste the was a hero to his valet de chambre. This entire day. Thus, when they had to attend mode grew so universal that children were entertainments on succeeding evenings, they made to submit to it, and all Nature seemed were forced to sleep in arm-chairs, for fear bewigged. The multiplicity of sizes and forms of endangering the finish of the coiffure! became so numerous that it was found necessary to frame a new technical vocabulary, now in parts obscure enough even for the most erudite. Thus there were " perruques grandes et petites en folio, en quarto, en trente-deux- perruques rondes, carrées, pointues; perruques à boudins, à papillons, à deux et trois marteaux," &c. &c. For a long time after this invention the head-dress retained the natural color of the hair, but in 1714 it became the fashion to have wigs bleached; the process, however, was ineffectual, and they speedily turned an ashen gray; to remedy which defect hairpowder was invoked- another wondrous device which speedily spread from the source and centre of civilization over the rest of Europe. The female head-dress, having now arrived at its most Alpine elevation, suddenly toppled over and fell, by the mere accident of the queen's hair coming off during her accouchement. The court, out of compliment to her majesty, wore the hair à l'enfant; others followed, and the fashion was at an end. And it was well it was so. It required all the art of our own Sir Joshua to bring this strange mode within the sphere of pictorial art. And yet in real life the white powder was not without its merit. It brought out the color of the cheeks, and added brilliancy to the eyes; in short, it was treating the face like a water-colored landscape, mounting it on an ocean of white, which brought out by contrast all its natural force and effect. Few can have forgotten how many of our beauties gained by figuring in powder at the court fancy balls of a few seasons back. The male peruke, startled, it would appear, by the vehement growth of the female coiffure, stood still, grew gradually more calm and reasonable, and at last, spurning any further contest with its rival, resigned altogether and the natural hair, powdered and gathered in a queue, at first long, then short, and tied with ribbon, became the mode to rout which it required a revolution; in '93 it fell together with the monarchy of France. In the world of fashion here the system stood out till somewhat later-but our Gallo-maniac whigs were early deserters, and Pitt's tax on hair-powder in 1795 gave a grand advantage to the innovating party. Pigtails continued, however, to be worn by the army, and those of a considerable length, until 1804, when they were by order reduced to seven inches; and at last, in 1808, another order commanded them to be cut off altogether. There had, however, been a keen qualm in the "parting spirit" of protection. The very next day brought a counter order: :- but, to the great joy of the rank and file at least, it was too late already the pigtails were all gone. The trouble given to the military by the old mode of powdering the hair and dressing the tail was inmense, and it often led to the most ludicrous scenes. The author of the "Costume of the British Soldier" relates that on one occasion, in a glorious dependency of ours, a field-day being ordered, and there not being sufficient barbers in the garrison to attend all the officers in the morning, the juniors must needs have their heads dressed over night, and, to preserve their artistic arrangement, pomatumed, powdered, curled, and clubbed, these poor wretches were forced to sleep as well as they could on their faces! Such was the rigidity with which certain modes were enforced in the army about this period that there was kept in the adjutant's office of each regiment a pattern of the correct curls, to which the barber could refer. The white, pretty ample, and terminating in pig- that The natural hair, after its long imprisonment, seemed for a moment to have run wild. The portraits of the beginning of the century, and even down to the time of Lawrence's supremacy, show the hair falling thickly upon the brow, and flowing, especially in the young, over the shoulders. Who can ever forget, that has once seen it, the portrait of young Lindley in the Dulwich Gallery by Sir Thomas noble and sad-looking brow, so softly shaded with luxuriant curls? At the present moment almost every lady one meets has her hair arranged in "bands"- nothing but bands, the most severe and trying of all coiffures, and one only adapted to the most classic style of beauty. For the face with a downright good-natured pug nose, or with one that is only pleasantly retroussé, to adopt it, is quite as absurd as for an architect to surmount an irregular Elizabethan building with a Dorie frieze. Every physiog nomy requires its own peculiar arrangement of For many years every trace of powder and hair, and we only wonder that this great truth pigtail has disappeared from the parade as has ever been lost sight of. There is a kind of well as the saloon and footmen are now the hair full of graceful waves, which in Ireland only persons who use a mode which once set is called "good-natured hair." There is off the aristocratic aspect of our Seymours something quite charming in its rippling line and Hamiltons. The horsehair court-wigs of across the forehead. Art has attempted to the judges seem to be recollections of the imitate it, but the eye immediately detects white perukes of the early Georgian era, but the imposture - it no more resembles the real they are far more massive and precise than thing than the set smile of the opera-dancer the old flowing head-dresses-their exact does the genuine play of the features from little curls and sternly cut brow-lines making some pleasurable emotion of the mind. This them fit emblems of the unbending, uncom- buckled hair is, in short, the same as that depromising spirit of the modern bench. Only nounced by the early churchmen under the thirty years ago, it must be remembered, the name of the malice of the Devil, a term which it sages of the law, even in ordinary society, sport- well deserves. There is another kind of hair ed a peculiar and marking head-gear; or rather which is inclined to hang in slender threadthere were two varieties in constant use, one like locks just on the sides of the face, allowbrief and brown for the morning, the othering the light and shade to fall upon the white |