loved to resort thither. Our great grandmothers however, when young, were extremely modest: many of them were afraid of venturing to a new play till their lovers assured them they might do so without offence to their exquisite delicacy. The bolder spirits, still modest but impatient, went in masks,—not unwilling to listen to savoury uncleanness, but so modest that they could not bear any one to see that they did not blush at it. "Such incidents as these," says the 'Spectator,' "make some ladies wholly absent themselves from the playhouse; and others never miss the first night of a new play, lest it should prove too luscious to admit of their going with any countenance to the second ;"—a most exquisite It was good enough however to authorize vizards; and the theatre became something like what Nat Lee in his 'Nero' describes Mount Ida to have been,—

reason.

"Where the gods meet and dance in masquerade!"

But Mount Ida had something divine about it, which our stage in the days of vizards certainly had not. As Joe Haines said to his masked audience, in the concluding lines of the prologue to the very play just named

"All tragedies, egad! to me sound oddly;

I can no more be serious than you godly."

The fashion, after it had been indifferently well worn by the ladies, of course fell to their maids, and Abigail wore the vizard which Lady Betty dropped. In Malcolm's 'London' (eighteenth century) a writer is quoted, whose communication shows whither the masks had fallen in 1731. It is in a letter on "Boxing Day," and in it occurs the following passage:-" My friend next carried me to the upper end of Piccadilly, where, one pair of stairs over a stable, we found near a hundred people of both sexes (some masked, others not), a great part of which were dancing to the music of two sorry fiddles. It is impossible to describe this medley of mortals

There were footmen,

fully; however, I will do it as well as I can. servant-maids, butchers, apprentices, oyster and orange women, and sharpers, which appeared to be the best of the company. This horrid place seemed to be a complete nursery for the gallows. My friend informed me it was called 'a threepenny hop;' and while we were talking, to my great satisfaction, by order of the Westminster justices, to their immortal honour, entered the constables and their assistants, who carried off all the company that was left; and had not our friend been known to them, we might have paid dear for our curiosity."

After all, Justice was here, as usual, uncommonly blind; for the boxing party, masked or not, was not more offensive against bonos mores than the Ranelagh parties, where powdered "bloods" percolated their dreadfully luscious nonsense through the filter on the faces of the masked "belles." And besides, masking at holidaytime had long been a privilege of the people. In 'Vox Graculi' (1623), above a century prior to the last date, I find it stated of Twelfth Night-"On this night, much masking in the Strand, Cheapside, Holborn, and Fleet-street."

I have already noticed how our exceedingly precious grandmothers used to resort to the theatres with covered faces instead of stopped-up ears. The ears of the public did however rise angrily at last; the palled appetite loathed the long-served food. A society was formed "for the reformation of manners, for immoral words and expressions contra bonos mores, uttered on the stage." The society retained hired informers, who sat in the pit, took down the naughty words and the names of the speakers, and then entered a prosecution against the utterers. They were driving a pretty trade, for the benefit of modesty and the suppression of masks, when all at once Queen Anne, sipping her hollands, gently bethought herself that these spies were flourishing by the abundance of that which they feigned desire to put down; and indeed the fellows were like some of our professional missionaries of the pavé, who steal spoons from chop-houses, and have as many wives as

Rugantino. The Queen accordingly crushed the trading prosecutions by a "Nolle prosequi," and took the matter into her own hands. She issued a "royal command" for the better regulation of the theatres, whereby she left to her Master of the Revels " the special care that nothing be acted in either of the theatres contrary to religion or good manners, upon pain of our high displeasure, and of being silenced from further acting."

Now, leaving to a Master of the Revels the care of suppressing revelry on the stage, was very much like entrusting to Satan the suppression of sin. However, so it was; but her Majesty tore the masks off herself, or rather threatened to do so, as thus:

"We do hereby strictly command that no person, of what quality soever, presume to go behind the scenes, or come upon the stage either before or during the acting of any piece; that no woman be allowed or presume to wear a vizard mask in either of the theatres; and that no persons come into either house without paying the price established for their respective places."

Good Queen Anne issued this decree in the second year of her reign, and it had just the effect that might have been expected. The houses played 'London Cuckolds' to vizards of masked ladies, as usual, on the 9th of November; and Pinckethman roared his buffoonery in his booth near Hyde Park during May Fair. What then did her Majesty deem contrary to religion and good manners? Well, I really do not know; but I do know that, in the very year of the decree, she herself had the comedy of 'Sir Salomon' acted before her and her ladies at court; and if she could listen to that without a blush, or a mask to conceal the want of it, why she must have construed immorality, and her royal command against it, in a very mild sense indeed.

The ladies were uncommonly angry with their liege mistress Anne for this decree, and the sentiment is exemplified by the song so popular at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre in 1704-'The Misses' Lamentation, for want of their Vizard Masques at the Theatre.' The "misses" however, and the matrons too, had long before this

indulged in a fashion which was not dropped until long subsequent to the fall of the mask.

About five years after Mrs. Pepys had taken Samuel for her liege lord, that is to say in 1660, she first essayed to add new lustre to her charms by affixing a few "beauty spots" to her face. "This is the first day," says he, on the 30th of August of the year above named, "that ever I saw my wife wear black patches since we were married." It was some time before the gentleman could make up his mind to the propriety of wearing these adjuncts to beauty. In October, he expresses his astonishment that even Lord Sandwich should "talk very high how he would have a French cook, and a master of his horse, and his lady and child to wear black patches; which methought was strange, but he has become a perfect courtier." It was perhaps because the court patronized patches, that Pepys permitted them on his wife. Hitherto the lady had worn them without the marital sanction, but in November we find him saying, "My wife seemed very pretty to-day, it being the first time I had given her leave to weare a black patch." And therewith this admiration increased; and some days later, on seeing his wife close to the Princess Henrietta (daughter of Charles I.) at court, on the occasion of a visit she paid to her brother Charles II., as Duchess of Orléans, he remarks: "The Princess Henrietta is very pretty;... but my wife standing near her, with two or three black patches on, and well-dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she."

A century subsequent to this, patches still kissed the cheek of beauty; and as professors taught how to wield the fan, so French essays were “done into English," and instruction therein given as to the secret of applying them in an artful manner, how to arrange them with the most killing effect, and how to so plant them about the eye that the expression desired should be at once achieved— whether of proud disdain, amorous languor, or significant boldness. They were the hieroglyphics of vanity and of party spirit;

and beaux and politicians read in the arrangement of patches not only the tender but the political principles of the wearer.

Despotism too had something to do with patches. Thus Lady Castlemaine fixed the fashion of mourning, by "forcing all the ladies to go in black, with their hair plain, and without spots." It is a curious trait of the manners of other times that a royal concubine should order the tiring of honest women. She could hardly have influenced that "comely woman," the Duchess of Newcastle, who went about, in the second Charles's time, with a velvet сар, her hair about her ears, "many black patches, because of pimples about her mouth," naked-necked, and in a black justaucorps.

The ladies marked or patched, the gentlemen red-heeled and similarly "nosed," had no greater delight than in killing time by looking at the "puppets;" and the fashion of these same puppets is a thing of such antiquity and such duration, that I may fairly add a chapter thereon to those through which I have already been accompanied by the courteous and indulgent reader.