The tie-wig, which Lord Bolingbroke helped to bring into fashion, was a very stiff and solid affair, as compared with the long curled perriwigs which preceded them. The curls appear as if hardened into rollers; and the pendant lumps of hair, looped and tied at the ends, as if modelled after the fashion of the proud horse-tails, turned up and bound with straw, at a fair. It would be as difficult to determine why such cumbrous wigs were tolerated without any beauty to recommend them, as to say why George I. chose such ugly German mistresses. Was it because, like certain kinds of old china, deformity was pleasing? The king’s favourites might possibly resemble the china, but the wigs were certainly not as frail. Horace Walpole has left us a lively description of Lord Sandwich’s tie-wig, in a letter to Sir H. Mann, 1745: “I would speak to our new ally, and your old acquaintance, Lord Sandwich, to assist in it; but I could have no hope of getting at his ear, for he has put on such a first-rate tie-wig, on his admission to the admiralty-board, that nothing without the lungs of a boatswain can ever think to penetrate the thickness of the curls. I think, however, it does honour to the dignity of ministers: when he was but a patriot, his wig was not of half its present gravity.” We have yet to notice the wig with the long _queue_, “small by degrees and beautifully less”--the drollest and most awkward of all additions to the human form since the long tails in Kent were inflicted on the men by a miracle, as a punishment for sticking fish tails to some monks’ garments. “As I live! The hair of one is tied behind, And plaited like a womankind, While t’other carries on his back, In silken bag, a monstrous pack: But pray, what’s that much like a whip, Which with the air does waving skip From side to side, and hip to hip? It is a modish pig-tail wig.”