Mercier groans over the contrast between French and English boys of this period. Take, he says, a little Gallic monseigneur to London, and introduce him to the son of a lord, a boy of his own age. What does he see? Clean, fair, and long flowing hair; the skin pure and healthy; the head unmolested by a peruke; the body supple and robust. The little Frenchman might be sulky thereat, but he found consolation in his gold-laced embroidery. He thinks to make an impression on the other boy by his profound bows, at which the English lad laughs; and when, according to the French custom, the little monseigneur advances to embrace the youthful Briton, the latter skips off, with the exclamation, that they wanted to take him in by pretending to introduce him to a playfellow, which proved to be only a monkey. The extravagances of fashion were carried to the utmost in France when it was the custom for ladies not only to keep the head powdered and uncleaned, but to wear over it a napkin less clean still. The authors of the period are murderously satirical against a mode which especially prescribes that the napkin should not only seem dirty, but be so. Lady Mary Wortley Montague however thought the idea admirable, and she adopted it with a nasty alacrity. The fashion nevertheless could not long “obtain,” and soon we find _la Mode_ raised from an art to a science, and women devoting themselves to the study thereof with an intensity worthy of a better cause. A pretty woman, says Mercier, meaning thereby a pretty Frenchwoman, daily goes twice through the ceremony of the toilet. The first was a mystery, from which lovers were as rigorously banished as the profane from solemn rites in the temples of old. A lover, says Mercier, dare not enter his lady’s tiring-bower but at an appointed hour. You may deceive a woman, but you must never come upon her by surprise: that is the rule; the most favoured and the most liberal of lovers never dares to infringe thereon. Mercier however seems to have had free admission to the performance of the early ceremony; for he says that thereat mysterious use was made of all the cosmetics whose application beautifies the skin. He only alludes to “other preparations which, among women, form a science apart,—ah! I might say, a whole encyclopædia.”