Later, when Tom Musgrave arrives, “Robert Watson, stealing a view of his own head in an opposite glass, said with equal civility, ‘You cannot be more in deshabille than myself. We got here so late that I had not time even to put a little fresh powder in my hair.’” The powders used were very various. “And now we are upon vanities, what do you think is the reigning mode as to powder? only tumerick, that coarse dye that stains yellow. It falls out of the hair and stains the skin so, that every pretty lady must look as yellow as a crocus, which I suppose will come a better compliment than as white as a lily.” (Mrs. Papendick.) Flour was frequently used for powdering heads, and in 1795 flour was very scarce and enormously valuable. In the same year when the powder tax was passed, the Privy Council “implored all families to abjure puddings and pies, and declared their own intention to have only fish, meat, vegetables, and household bread, made partly of rye. It was recommended that one quartern loaf per head per week should be a maximum allowance. The loaf was to be brought on the table for each to help himself, that none be wasted. The king himself had none but household bread on his table. In 1801 the Government offered bounties on the importation of all kinds of grain and flour, and passed the Brown Bread Act (1800) forbidding the sale of wheaten bread, or new bread of any kind, as stale bread would go further” (Mary Bateson in _Social England_). This scarcity and dearness of bread is a thing never felt in the present day, when lumps of the best white bread are flung in heaps in the squares and streets of London, and disdained even by tramps and beggars, and when boys in the North Country go round with sacks begging bits of bread which they afterwards use for feeding ponies or horses! Many epigrams and _bon mots_ were made on the new powder tax; a tax on dogs had at that time been generally expected, so one wit wrote— “Full many a chance or dire mishap, Ofttimes ‘twixt the lip and the cup is; The tax that should have hung our dogs, Excuses them, and falls on puppies.” Of the inconveniences attending the use of powder the following anecdote is an instance— “At one of Lady Crewe’s dinner parties, Grattan, after talking very delightfully for some time, all at once seemed disconcerted, and sunk into silence. I asked his daughter, who was sitting next to me, the reason of this. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘he has just found out that he has come here in his powdering coat.’” (Samuel Rogers, _Table Talk_.) The Act claimed one guinea a year from every user of powder, and was calculated to bring in about £400,000 per annum. The Royal Family, clergymen whose incomes were under a hundred pounds, subalterns and all below that rank in the army, officers in the navy under the rank of commander, and all below the two eldest unmarried daughters of a family were exempt.