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 drawing-rooms, 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.”