Nor was this feeling confined to the Romish Church in France. The Reformed Church was fully as hostile against the new and detested fashion. Bordeaux was in a state of insurrection, for no other reason than that the Calvinist pastor there had refused to admit any of his flock in wigs to the sacrament. And when Riviers, Protestant Professor of Theology at Leyden, wrote his 'Libertas Christiana circa Usum Capillitii Defensa' in behalf of perukes, the ultraorthodox in both churches turned to gore him. The Romanists asked, what could be expected from a Protestant but rank heresy? and the Protestants disowned a brother who defended a fashion which had originated with a Romanist. Each party stood by the words of Paul to the Corinthians. In vain did some suggest that the apostolical injunction was only local. The ultras would heed no such suggestion, and would have insisted on bare heads at both poles.

"And yet," remarked the wiggites, "it is common for preachers to preach in caps." "Ay," retorted the orthodox, "but that is simply because they are then speaking only in their own name. Reading the gospel or offering up the adorable sacrifice, they are speaking or acting in the name of the Universal Church. Of course," they added, “there are occasions when even a priest may be covered. If a Pope invented the baret, a curé may wear a cap.”

Sylvester was the first Pontiff who wore a mitre, but even that fashion became abused; and in the year 1000 a Pope was seen with his mitre on during mass-a sight which startled the faithful, and a fact which artists would be none the worse for remembering. After that period, bishops took to them so pertinaciously that they hardly laid them by on going to bed. These prelates were somewhat scandalized, when the Popes granted to certain dukes the privilege of wearing the mitre; but when the like favour was granted to abbots of a peculiar class, the prelatic execration was uttered with a jealous warmth that was perfectly astounding.

When the moderns brought the question back to its simple principles, and asked the sticklers for old customs if wigs were not

as harmless as mitres, they were treated with as scant courtesy as Mr. Gorham or the Lord Primate is in the habit of experiencing at the hands of a "mediæval" bishop. If, it was said, a priest must even take off his calotte in presence of a king or Pope, how may he dare to wear a wig before God? Richelieu was the first ecclesiastic of his rank in France who wore the modern calotte; but I very much doubt if he ever took it off in the presence of Louis XIII. It is known however that the French King's ambassador, M. d' Oppeville, found much difficulty in obtaining an audience at Rome. He wore a wig à calotte—that is, a wig with a coif, as though the tonsure had been regularly performed, and that the wig was natural hair. The officials declared he could not be introduced unless he took off the calotte. He could not do this without taking off the wig also, as he showed the sticklers of court etiquette, and stood before them with clean-shaven head; asking, at the same time,-" Would the Pope desire me to stand in his presence in such a plight as this?" The Pontiff however did not yield the point readily. Perhaps his Holiness, had he received the ambassador under bare poll, would have graciously served him as one of his predecessors had served the Irish saint, Malachi-put his pontifical tiara on the good man's head, to prevent his catching cold!

But of all the tilters against wigs, none was so serious and chivalresque as "Jean Batiste Thiers, Docteur en Théologie et Curé de Champrond." Dr. Thiers, in the year 1690, wrote a book of some six hundred pages against the wearing of wigs by ecclesiastics. He published the same at his own expense: and high authority pronounced it conformable in every respect to the "Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church." Dr. Thiers wrote a brief preface to his work, in which he invokes an abundant visitation of divine peace and grace on those who read his volume with tranquillity of mind, and who preferred truth to fashion. The invocation, I fear, is made in vain; for the tediousness of the author slays all tranquillity of spirit on the part of the reader,

who cannot however refrain from smiling at seeing the very existence of Christianity made to depend upon the question of perukes. The book is a dull book: but the prevailing idea in it -that it is all over with religion if perukes be not abolished-is one that might compel a cynic to inextinguishable laughter. Yes, says the Doctor, the origin of the tonsure is to be found in the cutting of Peter's hair by the Gentiles, to make him look ridiculous; therefore, he who hides the tonsure beneath a peruke insults the Prince of the Apostles! A species of reasoning, anything comparable with which is not to be found in that book which Rome has honoured by condemning-Whately's 'Logic.'

The volume however affords evidence of the intense excitement raised in France by the discussion of the bearing of wigs on Christianity. For a season, the question in some degree resembled, in its treatment at least, that of baptismal regeneration, as now treated among ourselves. No primitively-minded prelate would license a curé who professed neutrality on the matter of wigs. The wearers of these were often turned out of their benefices; but then they were welcomed in other dioceses, by bishops who were heterodoxly given to the mundane comfort of wiggery. Terrible scenes took place in vestries between wigged priests ready to repair to the altar, and their brethren or superiors who sought to prevent them. Chapters suspended such priests from place and profit; Parliaments broke the decree of suspension, and Chapters renewed the interdict. Decree was abolished by counter-decree, and the whole Church was rent in twain by the contending parties.

Louis XIV. took the conservative side of the question, so far as it regarded ecclesiastics; and the Archbishop of Rheims fondly thought he had clearly settled the dispute by decreeing, that wigs might or might not be worn, according to circumstances. They were allowed to infirm and aged priests, but never at the altar. One consequence was that many priests used first to approach near to the altar, and there taking off their wigs, deposit the same.

under protest, in the hands of attending notaries. Such a talk about heads had not kept a whole city in confusion since the days wherein St. Fructuarius, Bishop of Braga, decreed the penalty of entirely-shaven crowns against all the monks of that city caught in the fact of kissing any of its maidens. Three-fourths of the grave gentlemen thus came under the razor! Such would not have been the case, good reader, with you and me. Certainly not! We would not have been found out, and we know better than to "kiss and tell, as they do at Brentford."

Thiers could not see in the wig the uses discerned by Cumberland, who says, in his 'Choleric Man,'-"Believe me, there is much good sense in old distinctions. When the law lays down its full-bottomed periwig, you will find less wisdom in bald pates than you are aware of." The Curé of Champrond says that the French priests, who yearly spent their thirty or forty pistoles in wigs, were so irreligious that they kept their best wigs for the world, and their oldest for God!-wearing the first in drawingrooms, and the latter in church. This was certainly less ingenious than in the case of the man celebrated in the 'Connoisseur,' who, having but one peruke, made it pass for two:-"It was naturally a kind of flowing bob; but by the occasional addition of two tails, it sometimes passed as a major."

In France wigs ended by assuming the appearance of nature. In the Reign of Terror, the modish blonde perukes worn by females were made of hair purchased from the executioner, of whom old ladies bought the curls which had clustered about the young necks that had been severed by the knife of Samson. But after this the fashion ceased among women, as it had already done among men, beginning to do so with the latter when Franklin appeared in his own hair, unpowdered, at the Court of Louis XVI.; and from that period wigs have belonged only to history. If you please, gentle reader, we will now descend from the wig to the beard.

BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS.

"Now of beards there be

Such a company,

Of fashions such a throng
That it is very hard

To treat of the beard,

Though it be ne'er so long."

Ballad in LE PRINCE D'AMOUR. (1650.)

WHOEVER invented wigs, proud as he may be of the achievement, cannot boast of the same antiquity for his fashion as that which attaches to the beard. The beard, like sewing, came in with, or was a consequence of sin. With respect to sewing and sin, I have before spoken; and I will only add here, that in the most prosperous times of Puritanism, it was the fashion for Puritan ladies to wear aprons only of a green colour, that being presumedly the colour of the apron worn by Eve, whose daughters they were, and the remembrance of whose sin and the acknowledgment of their own, they perpetuated in the adopted fashion of their day.

It is confidently asserted by Dutch philosophers—so confidently that to suppose they have not good authority for what they assert, would be very ungenerous on my part-it is asserted then by these Hollanders that Adam was created without a beard, and that the latter appendage was suddenly conferred on his chin on the very evening of the day that he has been such a "beast" as to allow himself to be beguiled into rebellion by his wife. He was consequently so far changed into the similitude of a beast, being rendered most like the goat, who is an impostor in his way, wearing as he does the grave airs of a judge, and yet given to