an they
became very fashionable, and men had their portraits painted in them,
for instance the portrait of Nicholas Boylston, now in Harvard Memorial
Hall.

With the increase of trade with China many Chinese and East Indian goods
became fashionable, with hundreds of different names. A few were of silk
or linen, but far more of cotton; among them nankeens were the most
imported and even for winter wear.

Both men and women wore for many years great cloaks or capes, known by
various names, such as roquelaures, capuchins, pelisses, etc. Women's
shoes were of very thin materials, and paper-soled. They wore to protect
these frail shoes, when walking on the ill-paved streets, various forms
of overshoes, known as goloe-shoes, clogs, pattens, etc. When riding,
women in the colonies wore, as did Queen Elizabeth, a safeguard, a long
over-petticoat to protect the gown from mud and rain. This was sometimes
called a foot-mantle, also a weather-skirt. A traveller tells of seeing
a row of horses tied to a fence outside a Quaker meeting. Some carried
side saddles, some men's saddles and pillions. On the fence hung the
muddy safeguards the Quaker dames had worn outside their drab
petticoats. Men wore sherry-vallies or spatter-dashes to protect their
gay breeches.

There was one fashion which lasted for a century and a half which was so
untidy, so uncomfortable, so costly, and so ridiculous that we can only
wonder that it was endured for a single season--I mean the fashion of
wig-wearing by men. The first colonists wore their own natural hair. The
Cavaliers had long and perfumed love-locks; and though the Puritans had
been called Roundheads, their hair waved, also, over the band or collar,
and often hung over the shoulder. The Quakers, also, wore long locks, as
the lovely portrait of William Penn shows. But by 1675 wigs had become
common enough to be denounced by the Massachusetts government, and to be
preached against by many ministers; while other ministers proudly wore
them. Wigs were called horrid bushes of vanity, and hundreds of other
disparaging names, which seemed to make them more popular. They varied
from year to year; sometimes they swelled out at the sides, or rose in
great puffs, or turned under in heavy rolls, or hung in braids and curls
and pig-tails; they were made of human hair, of horsehair, goat's-hair,
calves' and cows' tails, of thread, silk, and mohair. They had scores of
silly and meaningless names, such as "gra