CAVALIER CURLS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVIII, Issue XVIII, 1 May 1897, Page 558

CAVALIER CURLS.

There arc perhaps no two party names ot history which call up before the mind of the average reader such vivid pictures as those of Roundhead and Cavalier. One need have stndied no deeper historic work than the * Woodstock ’ of Scott to summon their portraits before his mind’s eye in an instant—the close-cropped, energetic Roundbead, sombre and severe ; the gay and elegant Cavalier, with his great boots, his brilliant costume adorned with tags and slashes, and above all with his love-locks floating on his shoulder, and perhaps a dandy knot of ribbon at each side to tie them back from his ears. It is the Roundhead we respect, but the Cavalier was picturesque or he was nothing. His curls, the crown of his picturesqueness and the chief abhorrence of his Roundhead enemies, were at first natural, the art of the barber being concerned only in their artistic arrangement and the perfume with which they were scented ; but gradually they were supplanted by the wig. the fashion of wearing which was first brought from Paris by Charles 1., of whom it is recorded by a disapproving chronicler of the day that he * shadowed himself under a burly peruke, which none in former days bnt bald-headed people used.' Under Charles 11. wigs came into general use, and the famous diarist, Mr Samuel Pepys,—who was the son of a tailor, and always attached great importance to matte is of dress, —records in his diary the day on which he parted with his own hair and * paid three pounds for a periwigg.’ But he was evidently a little nervous concerning this important venture, for he records later that he went to church in it, adding with evident relief: ‘lt did not prove so strange as I was afraid it would.* In the recently published autobiography of William Bell Scott the author narrates a curious experience. He chanced to be present with a friend in the ancient London church of St. Bartholomew when some repairs were being made in the pavement, in the course of which an old grave was disturbed. The inscription, still legible, showed it to be that of a man who had held the position of hairdresser to his Majesty Charles 11. When the grave was opened there were taken from it two or three wheelbarrows full of curious cylindrical objects of white terra-cotta, the use of which no one could explain ; but Mr Scott, having the curiosity to investigate, afterward found them to be cnrling pins, two centuries old, of the kind employed to curl the flowing wigs of the Cavaliers and courtiers in the days of the Merry Monarch. How they came to be buried with the deceased hairdresser beneath the pavement of a church remained a mystery. Perhaps it was at his own request ; perhaps the fashion had begun to change and they were no longer of use, and were thus disposed of as a matter of convenience. The fancy for wigs increased until the reign of Queen Anne, under whom they were at their ugliest and most enormous, and after that declined until our own day. Americans travelling in England still occasionally observe with amusement a faint survival in the cumbrous white head-gear of the presiding j udge in a British court of law, and of the lawyers who practise before him.