Our social bees, or, Pictures of town & country life, and other papers / by Andrew Wynter.

Andrew Wynter

Date:: 1861

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our social bees, or, Pictures of town & country life, and other papers / by Andrew Wynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

529/556 page 515

of pious impulse were, however, of little avail; on the whole, the ahomination remained throughout the early reigns of both France and England quite triumphant. In Richard II.'s time the men, as well as the women, confined the hair over the brow with a fillet. What the clergy, with all their threats of excommunication and promises of paradise, could not effect in a series of ages, was at last brought about by an accident. Francis I., having been wounded in the head at a tournament, was obliged to have his hair cropped, whereupon the whole of fashionable France gave up their locks out of compliment to the sovereign. In the History of England/' illustrated with wood- cuts of the kings' heads, which we have all of us thumbed over so at school, the sudden and complete change in the method of wearing the hair between the in- stallation of the Tudor dynasty and the meridian of bluff King Hal must be well remembered. The portraits of the latter period by Holbein are, however, the best of illustrations. The women, as well as the men, appear almost totally deprived of hair, and we cannot help think- ing that much of the hard expression of features, which especially marks the female heads of Henry VIII/s great painter, was owing to the withdrawal of the softening influence of the hair. The close cropping of the gentle- men on the other hand gave them a virile aspect which especially suited with the reforming spirit of the age. As the hair shortened, the beard was allowed to flow. Indeed, this compensatory process has always obtained ; in no age, we think, have the hair and beard been allowed to grow long at the same time. Shakspeare was constantly 2l2

digitised image 1

digitised image 2

digitised image 3