Ralph Izard when a Little Boy. 1750. Ralph Izard when a Little Boy. 1750. It is a curious coincidence that a great philosopher of our own world wore a precisely similar dress in his youth. Madam Mary Bradford writes in a private letter, at the age of one hundred and three, of her life in 1805 in the household of Rev. Joseph Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson was then a little child of two years, and he and his brother William till several years old were dressed wholly in yellow flannel, by night and by day. When they put on trousers, which was at about the age of seven, they wore complete home-made suits of nankeen. The picture amuses me of the philosophical child, Ralph Waldo, walking soberly around in ugly yellow flannel, contentedly sucking his thumb; for Mrs. Bradford records that he was the hardest child to break of sucking his thumb whom she ever had seen during her long life. I cannot help wondering whether in their soul-to-soul talks Emerson ever told Carlyle of the yellow woollen dress of his childhood, and thus gave him the thought of the child’s dress for his philosopher. Fortunately for the children who were our grandparents. French fashions were not absorbingly the rage in America until after some amelioration of dress had come to French children. Mercier wrote at length at the close of the eighteenth century of the abominable artificiality and restraint in dress of French children; their great wigs, full-skirted coats, immense ruffles, swords on thigh, and hat in hand. He contrasts them disparagingly with English boys. The English boy was certainly more robust, but I find no difference in dress. Wigs, swords, ruffles, may be seen at that time both in English and American portraits. But an amelioration of dress did come to both English and American boys through the introduction of pantaloons, and a change to little girls’ dress through the invention of pantalets, but the changes came first to France, in spite of Mercier’s animadversions. These changes will be left until the later pages of this book; for during nearly all the two hundred years of which I write children’s dress varied little. It followed the changes of the parent’s dress, and adopted some modes to a degree but never to an extreme. CHAPTER XI PERUKES AND PERIWIGS _“As to a Periwigg, my best and Greatest Friend begun to find me with Hair before I was Born, and has continued to do so ever since, and I could not find it in my Heart to go to another.” _ —“Diary,” JUDGE SAMUEL SEWALL, 1718. _A phrensy or a periwigmanee That over-runs his pericranie._ —JOHN BYRON, 1730 (circa). CHAPTER XI PERUKES AND PERIWIGS T