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Updated: July 17, 2025
On the high plastered walls, above the book-shelves, rows of bygone Bassetts looked down on their departed possessions stately and severe in the artificial severity of periwigs and starched ruffles. They looked down with immobile eyes and the placid monotony of past fashions, smiling always the same smile, staring always at the same spot of floor or furniture.
He "braw'd it," as he says, with no doubt the finest of periwigs, long before he had ceased to be a skull-thatcher, and swaggered through the wynds and about the Cross with the best. The Edinburgh shopkeeper has never been "blate."
His hair indeed, as he says in one of his poems, was prematurely grey. But in that age of periwigs this misfortune was of little importance. The Duchess admired him, and proceeded to make love to him, after the fashion of the coarse-minded and shameless circle to which she belonged.
About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling, iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
The legislature of Massachusetts also denounced periwigs in 1675, but all in vain. They were termed by one author "artificial deformed Maypowles fit to furnish her that in a Stage play should represent some Hagge of Hell," and other choice epithets were applied. To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" could be hated, let us hear the pages of Judge Sewall's diary: "1701.
The party of young gentlemen who had been led by him at the University took him for their model in town, so that there were a set of beaux whose brocaded coats, lace steenkirks, sword-knots, and carriage were as like Sir John's as their periwigs were like his fair locks, they having been built as similar as possible by their peruquiers.
The cursed quarrel at the Tilt-yard had, I suppose, set the beaks upon me; and a pretty sweep they made of it. Ah, my dear! five hundred pounds in money, five suits of laced clothes, three periwigs, besides laced shirts, swords, canes, and snuff-boxes; and all to go back to that scoundrel Count.
Sometimes the whole waistcoat, which came down almost to the knees, was made of gold brocade." "Why, the wearer must have shone like a golden image!" said Clara. "And then," continued Grandfather, "they wore various sorts of periwigs, such as the tie, the Spencer, the brigadier, the major, the Albemarle, the Ramillies, the feather-top, and the full-bottom.
They huzzaed, hallooed, danced, and sang, and, in short, were elevated to such a pitch of intoxication, that when Peregrine proposed that they should burn their periwigs, the hint was immediately approved, and they executed the frolic as one man.
Before her eyes a thousand candles shone In the great chandeliers. A maze of curled And powdered periwigs past her eyes swirled. She smelt the smoke of candles guttering, And caught the scent of jewelled fans fluttering. Her most ambitious attempt in polyphonic prose is Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate Swings, whereof the title is like a trumpet fanfare.
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