"Your homely face, Flippanta, you disguise With patches numerous as Argus' eyes; I own that patching's requisite for you, For more we're pleased the less your face we view; Yet I advise, since my advice you ask, Wear but one patch, and be that patch a mask."
[Illustration: FANCY COSTUMES OF THE TIME OF LOUIS XIV.]
[Illustration: SIAMESE DRESS WORN AT THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV.]
The fashions set by the court of Louis were eagerly seized on by the whole of Europe. The flowing curls, lace cuffs, and profuse embroidery in use at the court of Charles of England were all borrowed from France, but the general licence and laxity of the period for some short time showed itself in the dress of the ladies, whilst fickleness and love of change, accompanied by thoughtless luxury and profusion, prevailed. The following complaint of a lady's serving-man, dated 1631, will show that the Puritans were not without reason in condemning the extravagances of the time:--
"Here is a catalogue as tedious as a taylor's bill of all the devices which I am commanded to provide (_videlicet_):--
"Chains, coronets, pendants, bracelets, and earrings, Pins, girdles, spangles, embroidaries, and rings, Shadomes, rebatacs, ribbands, ruffs, cuffs, falls, Scarfs, feathers, fans, maskes, muffes, laces, cauls, Thin tiffanies, cobweb lawn, and fardingales, Sweet sals, vyles, wimples, glasses, crumping pins, Pots of ointment, combs, with poking-sticks, and bodkins, Coyfes, gorgets, fringes, rowels, fillets, and hair laces, Silks, damasks, velvets, tinsels, cloth of gold, Of tissues with colours a hundredfold, But in her tyres so new-fangled is she That which doth with her humour now agree, To-morrow she dislikes; now doth she swear That a losse body is the neatest weare, But ere an hour be gone she will protest A strait gown graces her proportion best.
"Now calls she for a boisterous fardingale, Then to her hips she'll have her garments fall. Now doth she praise a sleeve that's long and wide, Yet by and by that fashion doth deride; Sometimes she applauds a pavement-sweeping train, And presently dispraiseth it again; Now she commands a shallow band so small That it may seem scarce any band at all; But now a new fancy doth she reele, And calls for one as big as a coach-wheele; She'll weare a flowry coronet to-day, The symbol of her beauty's sad decay; To-morrow she a waving plume will try, The emblem of all female levitie; Now in her hat, then in her hair is drest, Now of all fashions she thinks change the best."