Lace continued the mania of the day. "Since your fantastical geers came in with wires, ribbons, and laces, and your furbelows with three hundred yards in a gown and petticoat, there has not been a good housewife in the nation,"[1044] writes an indignant dramatist. The lover was made to bribe the Abigail of his mistress with a piece of Flanders lace[1045]--an offering not to be resisted. Lace appeared {352}at baptisms,[1046] at marriages, as well as at burials, of which more hereafter--even at the Old Bailey, where one Miss Margaret Caroline Rudd, a beauty of the day, tried for forgery, quite moved her jurors to tears, and nigh gained her acquittal by the taste of her elegantly-laced stomacher, the lace robings of her dress, and single lace flounce, her long pendulous ruffles, hanging from the elbow, heard, fluttering in her agitation, by the court; but, in spite of these allurements, Margaret Caroline Rudd was hanged. Every woman, writes Swift,[1047] is "In choosing lace a critic nice, Knows to a groat the lowest price." Together, they "Of caps and ruffles hold the grave debate, As of their lives they would decide the fate." Again, he says:-- "And when you are among yourselves, how naturally, after the first compliments, do you entertain yourselves with the price and choice of lace, apply your hands to each other's lappets and ruffles, as if the whole business of your life and the public concern depended on the cut of your petticoats."[1048] Even wise Mrs. Elizabeth Montague, who wrote epistles about the ancients, and instead of going to a ball, sat at home and read Sophocles, exclaims to her sister--"Surely your heroic spirit will prefer a beau's hand in Brussels lace to a stubborn Scævola without an arm." PLATE LXXXIV. [Illustration: JOHN LAW, THE PARIS BANKER, Author of the Mississippi Scheme, 1671-1729.--In cravat of Point de France, between 1708-20. Painted by Belle. National Portrait Gallery. Photo by Walker and Cockerell.] _To face page 352._ {353}In the middle of the nineteenth century it was the fashion that no young lady should wear lace previous to her marriage. In the reign of George II. etiquette was different, for we find the Duchess of Portland presenting Mrs. Montague, then a girl, with a lace head and ruffles. Wrathfully do the satirists of the day rail against the expense of "The powder, patches, and the pins, The ribbon, jewels, and the rings, The lace, the paint, and warlike things That make up all their magazines,"[1049] and the consequent distress of the lace merchants, to whom ladies are indebted for thousands. After a drawing-room, in which the fair population appeared in "borrowed," _i.e._, unpaid lace,[1050] one of the chief lacemen became well-nigh bankrupt. Duns besieged the houses of the great:-- "By mercers, lacemen, mantua-makers press'd; But most for ready cash, for play distress'd, Where can she turn?"[1051]