Reverend John Marsh. Reverend John Marsh. A climax of wig-hating was reached by one who has been styled “The Last of the Puritans”—Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston. Constant references in his diary show how this hatred influenced his daily life. He despised wigs so long and so deeply, he thought and talked and prayed upon them, until they became to him of undue importance; they became godless emblems of iniquity; an unutterable snare and peril. We find Sewall copying with evident approval a “scandalous bill” which had been “posted” on the church in Plymouth in 1701. In this a few lines ran:— “Our churches are too genteel. Parsons grow trim and trigg With wealth, wine, and wigg, And their crowns are covered with meal.” John Adams in Youth. John Adams in Youth. Bitter must have been his efforts to reconcile to his conscience the sight of wigs upon the heads of his parson friends, worn boldly in the pulpit. He would refrain from attending a church where the parson wore a wig; and his italicized praise of a dead friend was that he “was a true New-English man and _abominated periwigs_.” A Boston wig-maker died a drunkard, and Sewall took much melancholy satisfaction in dilating upon it. Cotton Mather and Sewall had many pious differences and personal jealousies. The parson was a handsome man (see his picture here), and he was a harmlessly and naively vain man. He quickly adopted a “great bush of vanity”—and a very personable appearance he makes in it. Soon we find him inveighing at length in the pulpit against “those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, those who were zealous against an innocent fashion taken up and used by the best of men.” “’Tis supposed he means wearing a Perriwigg,” writes Sewall after this sermon; “I expected not to hear a vindication of Perriwiggs in Boston pulpit by Mr. Mather.” Poor Sewall! his regard of wigs had a severe test when he wooed Madam Winthrop late in life. She was a rich widow. He had courted her vainly for a second wife. And now he “yearned for her deeply” for a third wife, so he wrote. And ere she would consent or even discuss marriage she stipulated two things: one, that he keep a coach; the other, that he wear a periwig. When all the men of dignity and office in the colony were bourgeoning out in great flowing perukes, she was naturally a bit averse to an elderly lover in a skullcap or, as he often wore, a hood. His love did not make him waver; he stoutly persisted in his refusal to assume a periwig. His portrait in a velvet skullcap shows a fringe of white curling hair with a few forehead locks. I fancy he was bald. Here is his entry with regard to young Parson Willard’s wig, in the year 1701:—