It was one of the affectations of the time for the gallants to go abroad with their faces half covered by their cloaks and their hats drawn down. Hence the stage custom of throwing the cloak across from the right to the left. The coats of inferior functionaries, such as bailiffs or catchpoles, were adorned with pewter buttons. A country gentleman’s dress consisted of Devonshire Kersey suit, coarse cloth coat, Dutch felt hat, worsted stockings, and neat leather shoes. All craftsmen wore aprons, but these were different; the blacksmith had a leathern apron, the grocer a white apron, the vintner a blue apron, and so on. One could formerly recognise a man’s trade by his dress and appearance. I find that this century introduced the use of the nightcap, perhaps for the sake of quiet, because, with the bawling of the watchman, the cry of the chimney-sweep, and the noise of the laundresses, who began about midnight, there was almost as much noise at night as by day. If men disfigured themselves with wigs, the women heightened their charms, as they believed, by sticking little bits of black taffeta on their faces. The fashion began in the Commonwealth, when ladies began to cut out stars, circles, and even figures representing a coach and four, and stick them upon their cheek, forehead, or chin:— “Her patches are of every cut, For pimples and for scars; Here’s all the wandering planets’ signs, And some of the fixed stars.” Like the fashion of the wig, the patch lasted more than a hundred years. Indeed, it lasted even into the nineteenth century. And in 1826, a lady, speaking of a toilet-table, speaks of the patch-boxes upon it. This proves, I take it, that the patch-box still retained its position on the table, though the use of it had been abandoned. I have one of these patch-boxes; it is of silver, about the same size as a snuff-box, but a great deal deeper. Ladies painted as well as patched. They prepared their faces for the paint with oil. The page—_The Silent Woman_—says that “my lady kisses me with her oil’d face and puts a peruke on my head.” They seem all to have worn a peruke. Mrs. Otter, according to her husband, has a peruke “like a pound of hemp, made up in shoe threads.” They understood the art of making up. “Her teeth were made on the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street.... She takes herself asunder when she goes to bed into some twenty boxes; and about noon next day is put together again like a great German clock.” In walking with a lady the custom was to take her fan and play with it for her. A fine gentleman displayed his fashion and his grace by the way he handled and waved the fan.