We are not therefore to conclude that they were rakes and ready to throw themselves into the arms of the first adventurer they met; but we must infer that their delicacy was less susceptible and their modesty less sensitive than now. In Lockhart's Life of Scott'* there is an instructive anecdote told by Sir Walter, which remarkably illustrates this change in the public taste. A grand-aunt of his, Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, when a very old lady, once asked him whether he had ever seen Mrs. Behn's novels. Sir Walter confessed that he had. She then asked him whether he could get her a sight of them, and, "with some hesitation," he said he believed he could, but he did not think that she would like either the manners or language. Nevertheless," said the good old lady,

I remember their being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again." "So," says Sir Walter, "I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with 'private and confidential' on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words-Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put * Vol. v. pp. 136-7.

her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. first novel. But is it not,' she said, 'a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London ?'”

66

CHAPTER II.

DRESS. MASQUERADES.-DRUMS.-" PRETTY FELLOWS AND MACCARONIES.”—CLUBS.—RANELAGH AND VAUXHALL.LONDON.-DANGERS OF THE STREETS.--STATE OF THE ROADS.-HIGHWAYMEN.

L

ET us now go a little more into detail, and consider some of the aspects of the social life and habits of our great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grand

mothers.

At

And first as to the dress of the ladies. the beginning of the last century the fashionable head-dress was the commode, or fontage, by which the hair was piled up on wires to a prodigious height. Then there came a sudden fall, so that women who were more than seven feet high were reduced to five. In a letter in the Spectator,' from a barrister of the Middle Temple who "rode" the Western Circuit, he says that one of the most fashionable women he met with in all the circuit was the landlady at Staines, and her commode was not half a foot high, and her petticoat "within some yards of a

modish circumference." The writer of a letter in the 'London Magazine' of August, 1768, says, "I went the other morning to make a visit to an elderly aunt of mine, when I found her pulling off her cap and tendering her head to the ingenious Mr. Gilchrist, who has lately obliged the public with a most excellent essay on hair. He asked her how long it was since her head had been opened or repaired. She answered, not above nine weeks. To which he replied, that it was as long as a head could well go in summer, and that therefore it was proper to deliver it now; for he confessed that it began to be a little hazarde." * And to show how the follies of fashion repeat themselves, I may mention that the satirists of the last century used to mourn over the nakedness of the birds which had been robbed of their plumage to deck the heads of the ladies.

When Lydia Melford, in Humphry Clinker,' dresses for an assembly, she says, "I was not six hours in the hands of the hair-dresser, who stuffed my head with as much black wool as would have made a quilted petticoat, and after all it was the smallest head in the assembly except my aunt's." In Miss Burney's Evelina' the heroine says, "I have just had my hair

* Quoted in 'Wright's Caricature History of the Georges.'

dressed. You cannot think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it . . . . When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell; for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult."

In the reigns of George I. and George II. the petticoats of the ladies attained such a monstrous and extravagant size as to become the favourite subjects of satire and caricature. Mrs. Delany says in one of her letters, written in 1738-" The fashionable hoops are made of the richest damask with gold and silver, fourteen guineas a hoop."* There is in the 'Tatler,'† a paper which gives an account of a mock trial of a pretty young woman for wearing a monstrous petticoat, which when taken off the judge ordered to be drawn up by a pulley, and it formed "a very vast and splendid canopy, and covered the whole court of judicature with a kind of silken rotunda, in its form not unlike the cupola of St. Paul's." Counsel was heard in defence of the petticoat, and amongst other arguments they insinuated that its weight and unwieldiness might be of great use to preserve

* Mrs. Delany's 'Autobiography,' vol. ii. p. 25.

+ No. 116.