Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as dress masks wrinkles. Perhaps this saying of his was founded on the circumstance, that Queen Elizabeth not only wore dresses of increasing splendour with increasing age, but that she also used occasionally to appear masked on great gala occasions. The mode thus royally given, was not however very speedily or generally followed. The introduction of masks as a fashion appears to have “obtained,” as old authors call it, only about the year 1660. Pepys, in 1663, says that he went to the Royal Theatre, and there saw Howard’s comedy of ‘The Committee’ (known to us in its new form and changed name of ‘The Honest Thieves’). He designates it as “a merry but indifferent play, only Lacy’s part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination.” Among the company were Viscount Falkenberg, or Falconbridge, with his wife, the third daughter of Cromwell. “My Lady Mary Cromwell,” he goes on to say, “looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the house began to fill, she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; _which of late is become a great fashion_ among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So,” he adds,—and it shows, does that sighed-forth “_So!_” the melancholy consequence of leading wives into temptation,—“So to the Exchange, to buy things, with my wife; among others a vizard for herself.” Certainly that pretty precisian, Mary Cromwell, in a vizard at the play, sounds oddly; one would as soon expect to hear of Mrs. Chisholm at a Casino! No wonder Mrs. Pepys admired her! But Mrs. Pepys was not very long content with her English vizard; for six months after we find the little man, her husband, recording—“To Covent Garden, to buy a maske at the French house, Madame Charett’s, for my wife.” The taste of Mrs. Pepys was doubtless influenced by the example of the court, “where six women, my Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Monmouth being two of them, and six men, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arran, and Monsieur Blanfort (Lord Feversham) being three of them, in vizards, but most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most gloriously.” What Pepys thought of the fashion and the time is seen again by a sighing comment—“God give us cause to continue the mirth!” The fashion was still in full force in 1667; and to what purpose it was used, and to what purpose it might be abused, may be seen in the following extract.