The auburn tresses of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, were always _bien coiffée_, if we may judge from her various portraits. She scorned the hoods, lace caps, and pointed coifs, worn by her contemporaries, and adopted a miniature crown or jaunty hat of velvet, elaborately jewelled. Her fair complexion and light hair were thrown into relief by ruffles of lace, and this delicate fabric was stretched over fine wire frames, which met at the back, and remotely suggested the fragile wings of the butterfly, or the nimbus of a saint, neither of which ornaments was particularly appropriate to the lady in question. The front hair was turned over a cushion, or dressed in stiff sausage-like curls, pinned close to the head, and was adorned with strings and stars of flashing gems and a pendant resting on the forehead. [Illustration: A BEAUTY OF THE COURT OF CHARLES II.] That splendid historian, Stubbs, who has left us such minute particulars of the fashions of his time, quaintly describes the coiffure of the ladies of the Court. He states: "It must be curled, frizzled, crisped, laid out in wreaths and borders from one ear to the other, and lest it should fall down, must be underpropped with forkes and weirs, and ornamented with gold or silver curiously wrought. Such gewgaws, which being unskilful in woman's tearms, I cannot easily recount. Then upon the toppes of their stately turrets, stand their other capital ornaments: a French hood, hatte, cappe, kircher and suchlike, whereof some be of velvet, some of this fashion and some of that. Cauls made of netwire, that the cloth of gold, silver, or tinsel, with which their hair was sometimes covered, might be seen through; and lattice caps with three horns or corners, like the forked caps of popish priests." The Harleian MSS., No. 1776, written in the middle of Elizabeth's reign, refers to an ordinance for the reformation of gentlewomen's head-dress, and says: "None shall wear an ermine or lattice bonnet unless she be a gentlewoman born, having Arms." This latter phrase, we may conclude, refers to armorial bearings, not to physical development. The wearing of false hair and periwigs was left to the sterner sex for some years after the restoration of the House of Stuart, and women were satisfied with well-brushed ringlets escaping from a bandeau of pearls, or beautified by a single flower. The hair was often arranged in small, flat curls on the forehead, as in the sketch of a Beauty of the Court of Charles II.; and this fashion had a softening effect on the face, and was known as the "Sevigné style." [Illustration: END OF 17TH CENTURY.]