irely too respectable to comport well with the freedom of
the reign of Charles. Then, too, the artistic taste of the day, which
ran to portrait painting, had enhanced the estimate of ladies with
regard to the matter of their personal charms. So it was regarded not
only as artistic, but aesthetic, in a wider sense, to run to realism.
The word "run" is used advisedly, for there was a veritable scramble
to get rid of the formal and, it must be conceded, ridiculous ruff.
But when the latter disappeared from the neck and shoulders, there was
nothing adapted to fulfil its functions, so that, through a lamentable
omission on the part of the English women or their too hasty adoption
of French fashions, the shoulders and bosoms of the ladies were given
little consideration by the designers or the makers of their gowns.

But the head was not treated so indifferently as the shoulders, for,
when the plain top hat of the Puritan was abandoned, the milliner
already had something at hand to compensate the ladies for their loss.
Feathers of rare plumage and rich color were employed in the widest
profusion. The hoods, too, underwent the general metamorphosis, and
emerged from their penitential gray into "yellow bird's eye," and
other tints as indescribable. The new styles exposed their votaries to
wide criticism. Many pamphlets appeared whose straightforward titles
showed in what an undisguised manner the subject was to be found
treated within them. The general complaint was that immodest dress
was not confined to balls and chambers of entertainment, but that
women brazenly appeared in similar costume at church, braving all
criticism to satisfy their morbid desire for observation. The mode of
hair-dressing of the period ran largely to ringlets, which, as they
appear in the portraits of the great ladies of the day, seem at the
present time stiff and unartistic. The art of using cosmetics, which
had lapsed during the Puritan period, was actively revived, and it
was not only the stage beauties, but the court women as well, who used
paint in such profusion as almost to disguise their identity.

It can easily be seen that a woman of the period must have been a
gorgeous spectacle in full dress, with painted face adorned with
black patches cut in designs of hearts, Cupids, and occasionally even
coaches and four, and with her hair dressed in the prevailing mode,
which was to have "false locks set on wyres to make them stand at a
distance from