The Puritanic fashions of dress, manners, and speech still continued in the City. While the Court party wore their hair long and curled, the Puritans cropped theirs close; they drawled in their speech; they interlarded their discourse with texts and allusions to Scripture; they still, though the power had gone from them, denounced all sorts of merry-makings, all sports, all festivals and games as damnable; still they continued to find their chief joy and solace at a sermon. There was reason for this; for while their thoughts were mainly occupied with twisting texts into the support of their favourite doctrines, the preacher, who was engaged in exactly the same pursuit, gave them materials for the maintenance of their doctrines, or for discussion and controversy afterwards. The women, it is said, took down the principal points in shorthand, being as much interested and as keen in controversy as the men. I do not know any period in which it could not be said that the dress of the gallants and courtiers, as well as that of the ladies, was not extravagant and costly. Certainly the dress of the gallants in the seventeenth century, except for the fifteen years of Puritan austerity, was costly and extravagant enough to please any one. It does not appear, however, that the extravagance in dress descended to the City or to the City madams. In the time of Elizabeth the excessive adornment of the latter was the subject of many satirical pens. Under Charles II. the sobriety of the men, still more or less under Puritan influence, was reflected in the quiet dress of the women. As for the Court ladies, Evelyn observes that they paint; Pepys finds patches coming in with the Restoration; he also notices, but without admiration, the hair frizzed up to the ears; in 1662 he says they began to wear perukes—by which I understand some addition to their own hair; next year he observes the introduction of the vizard. In July 1663 he witnesses the riding of the King, Queen, and Court in Hyde Park. “The King and the Queen, who looked in this dress, a white-laced waistcoat and a crimson short petticoat, with her hair dressed _à la négligence_, mighty pretty, and the King rode hand in hand with her. Here was also my Lady Castlemaine [who] rode among the rest of the ladies: but the King took, methought, no notice of her.... She looked mighty out of humour, and had a yellow plume in her hat, which all took notice of, and yet is very handsome.... I followed them up into Whitehall and into the Queen’s presence, where all the ladies walked, talking and fiddling with their hats and feathers, and changing and trying one another’s by one another’s head and laughing.... But above all Mrs. Stewart in this dress, with her hat cocked and a red plume, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose and excellent taille, is now the greatest beauty I ever saw, I think, in my life.” [Illustration: An English Lady of quality Lady of the Court of England From contemporary engravings by Hollar.]