Queen Elizabeth stood no nonsense in these things; finding that London ’prentices had adopted a certain white stitching for their collars, she put a stop to this mild finery by ordering the first transgressor to be whipped publicly in the hall of his company. These same laws, tinkered and altered to suit occasions, appear for many years in English records, for years after New England’s sumptuary laws were silenced. Notwithstanding Hannah Lyman and the thirty-six vain Northampton girls, we do not on the whole hear great complaint of extravagance in dress or deportment. At any rate none were called bouncing girls. The portraits of men or women certainly show no restraint as to richness in dress. Their sumptuary laws were of less use to their day than to ours, for they do reveal to us what articles of dress our forbears wore. While the Massachusetts magistrates were fussing a little over woman’s dress, the parsons, as a whole, were remarkably silent. Of course two or three of them could not refrain from announcing a text from Isaiah iii, 16 _et seq_., and enlarging upon the well-worn wimples and nose jewels, and bells on their feet, which were as much out of fashion in Massachusetts then as now. It is such a well-rounded, ringing, colorful arraignment of woman’s follies you couldn’t expect a parson to give it up. Every evil predicted of the prophet was laid at the door of these demure Puritan dames,—fire and war, and caterpillars, and even baldness, which last was really unjust. Solomon Stoddard preached on the “Intolerable Pride in the Plantations in Clothes and Hair,” that his parishioners “drew iniquity with a cord of vanity and sin with a cart-rope.” The apostle Paul also furnished ample texts for the Puritan preacher. Rebecca Rawson. Rebecca Rawson.