Lely and Kneller could best illustrate the heroic age of wigs; but Hogarth’s ready pencil furnishes abundant details of their social state. The comic element seems to abound in all his sketches of wigs. In his print of “The Bench,” they slumber in the softest repose, in undisturbed gravity, and nod with the profoundest humour. The eminent lawyers were not all senior wranglers in those days. Look at the print of “The Country Dance,” and say if ever wigs hung more unbecomingly on the shoulders of the most awkward frights; but for an enormous pig-tail wig where could we select a finer specimen than in the print of “Taste in High Life.” These choice Exotics, as he has labelled them, are evidently great favourites with this humourous artist. But the print we are most concerned with is “THE FIVE ORDERS OF PERIWIGS, _as they were worn at the late Coronation, measured Architectonically_.” At the foot of the print the following advertisement is added: In about 17 years will be completed, in 6 vols. folio, price 15 guineas. The exact measurements of the Periwigs of the Ancients, taken from the Statues, Bustos, and Basso-Relievos of Athens, Palmyra, Balbec, and Rome, by Modesto, Periwig-maker, from Lagado. Five rows of perriwigs, faithful portraits we dare be sworn every one, illustrate the Five Orders of Perriwigs. First in order we have the EPISCOPAL, OR PARSONIC WIGS, followed by the OLD PEERIAN OR ALDERMANIC; the LEXONIC; COMPOSITE, _or Half Natural_; and, last of all, the QUEERINTHIAN. The reader will understand from the advertisement given above that the engraving was a notable quiz on Athenian Stuart, as he was called, whose laborious and accurate work on the Antiquities of Athens has been of such service to architects. It is said that the portrait of Stuart, outlined as a wig-block in the original was so unmistakably like the author of the Antiquities that Hogarth struck off the nose on purpose to disguise the joke a little. One of the OLD PEERIAN order of wigs was at once recognized as a hit at the notorious Bubb Doddington, “the last grave fop of the last age:” “Who, quite a man of gingerbread, Savour’d in talk, in dress, and phiz, More of another world than this.”