“The black silk Hood, with formal pride First roll’d, beneath the chin was tied So close, so very trim and neat, So round, so formal, so complete, That not one jag of wicked lace Or rag of linnen white had place Betwixt the black bag and the face, Which peep’d from out the sable hood Like Luna from a sullen cloud.” It was doubtless selected by the women followers of Fox on account of its ancient record of sobriety and sanctity. “Are the pinch’d cap and formal hood the emblems of sanctity? Does your virtue consist in your dress, Mrs. Prim?” writes Mrs. Centlivre in _A Bold Stroke for a Wife_. The black hood was worn long by Quaker women ere they adopted the beaver hat of the eighteenth century, and the poke-bonnet of the nineteenth century. Here is given a portrait of Hannah Callowhill Penn, a Quaker, the second wife of William Penn. She was a sensible woman brought up in a home where British mercantile thrift vied with Quaker belief in adherence to sober attire, and her portrait plainly shows her character. Penn’s young and pretty wife of his youth wears a fashionable pocket-hoop and rich brocade dress; but she wears likewise the simple black hood (here). The dominance of this black French hood came not, however, through its wear by sober-faced, discreet English Puritans and Quakers, but through a French influence, a court influence, the earnestness of its adoption by Madame de Maintenon, wife of King Louis XIV of France. The whole dress of this strange ascetic would by preference have been that of a penitent; but the king had a dislike of anything like mourning, so she wore dresses of some dark color other than black, generally a dull brown. The conventual aspect of her attire was added to by this large black hood, which was her constant wear, and is seen in her portraits. The life at court became melancholy, dejected, filled with icy reserve. And Madame, whether she rode “shut up in a close chair,” says Duclos, “to avoid the least breath of air, while the King walked by her side, taking off his hat each time he stopped to speak to her”; or when she attended services in the chapel, sitting in a closed gallery; or even in her own sombre apartments, bending in silence over ecclesiastic needlework,—everywhere, her narrow, yellow, livid face was shadowed and buried in this black hood. Madame de Miramion. Madame de Miramion. Her strange power over the king was in force in 1681, and, until his death in 1715, this sable hood, so unlike the French taste, covered the heads of French women of all ages and ranks. The genial, almost quizzical countenance of that noble and charitable woman, Madame de Miramion, wears a like hood.