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 had 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 being given to very frolicsome indulgences, in which judges should not, though they often do, indulge. If this be fact, one may wonder why Eve and her daughters generally escaped this badge of opprobrium. It was perhaps on the principle according to which we punish the receiver more than the thief. If there were no receivers there would be less pilferers; and though Eve offered the temptation, if Adam had only resisted it, the consequences would have been confined within their original narrow limits, and Mr. Mechi’s razor-strops would have been without a market.