“To the King’s House to ‘The Maid’s Tragedy,’ but vexed all the while with two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased to have their discourse, he being a stranger. And one of the ladies would and did sit with her mask on through all the play; and, being as exceeding witty as ever I heard woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; _but_ was, _I believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality_. He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out who she was, and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was but pulling off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant _rencontre_ I never heard;” and then once more a groaning commentary,—“but by that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly.” In the following year Pepys makes record of his having been at Bartholomew Fair with his wife and a party. We “took a link,” he says, “the women resolving to be dirty, and walked up and down to get a coach; and my wife being a little before me, had like to have been taken up by one whom we saw to be Sam Hartlib. My wife had her vizard on; yet we cannot say that he meant any hurt; for it was just as she was by a coach-side, which he had, or had a mind to take up: and he asked her, ‘Madam, do you go in this coach?’ but as soon as he saw a man come to her (I know not whether he knows me) he departed away apace.” By all which we may see that a vizard at a fair was evidently “an outward and visible sign,” recognized by the rakes and gallants of the locality. A vizard in the Park, at dusk, was equally intelligible; and though the men were not masked at that or any other hour, they were at that time and place more than sufficiently disguised. “And _now_,” says Vincent, in Sir George Etherege’s comedy of ‘Love in a Wood, or St. James’s Park,’—“now a man may carry a bottle under his arm, instead of his hat, and no observing, spruce fop will miss the cravat that lies on one’s shoulder, or count the pimples on one’s face.” As at park and fair, so fell the convenient covering into evil application at the play itself. The matter is alluded to by the Widow Blackacre in the epilogue to the ‘Plain Dealer:’— “For as in Hall of Westminster Sleek sempstress vends amid the Courts her ware; So while we bawl, and you in judgement sit, The visor-mask sells linen too i’ the pit.” By the end of the seventeenth century the fashion of masks was being tarnished by vulgarity; and the practice of concluding comedies with a ‘Marriage in a Mask,’ a ceremony which may not have been unusual, was already considered as a stale device. Congreve winds up two of his comedies, ‘The Old Bachelor’ and ‘Love for Love,’ with this jovial sort of bouquet.