who follow fashion through all her flights, and devote themselves to personal decoration, will, after a short apprenticeship, lose all that is dignified in personal character. May it not be suspected, for instance, that the tassels, and chains, and fringes, and furs, of a lately much-talked-of fashionable corps, have had some influence in generating a pride, conceit, and coxcombry hitherto unknown in our army, and utterly dissimilar to the noble, unaffected, and manly character of the BRITISH SOLDIER?

The history of WIGS, in our own country, is but of recent date, as they appear to have been among the many good things for which England was indebted to the Continent, so lately as the restoration of Charles the Second. They had been known, however, and popular, in other nations, from high antiquity. The Greeks and Romans wore false hair; and the Carthaginian Hannibal adopted the custom, either from necessity or foppery. Lampridius gives a description of the Emperor Commodus's wig, which was powdered with gold dust, and anointed with unguents of an agreeable odour, to fix this,

precious material to the locks. It appears not improbable that, even then, not merely a vain affectation of pomp, but the effects of vicious gallantry, might have given occasion to this invention. For further information on this subject, the reader is referred to the learned commentators on the satyrical exclamation of Cæsar's soldiers, during his triumphal entry into Rome:-Urbani servate uxorem, mæchum calvum adducimus! Henry the Third of France lost his hair by his vices; he had, therefore, one of the caps, then usually worn, covered with hair; but yet he ventured not to take off his hat in the presence of his Queen, or of the foreign ambassadors, for fear they should observe his loss. In 1518, John duke of Saxony ordered his head bailiff at Coburg to procure for him, from Nurenberg, a handsome false head of hair, but secretly, (wrote he,) that it may not be known that it is for us; and let it be curled, and so contrived that it may be put on the head without being observed. But, in the reign of Louis XIV., when polite manners and gallantry had become more general, men more sensibly affected with

cold, &c., and bald heads more common, they were no longer ashamed of the caps covered with false hair: even many people who had not lost their own, wore these false coverings of the head, from an affectation of fashionable gallantry. This gave rise to the idea of weaving hair into a linen cloth; and, likewise, into fringes, which were used for some time under the name of Milan points. These fringes or laces of hair were sewed in rows to the plain caps, which were now made of a thinner sheep-skin; and were called by the French, perruque; by the Germans, parucke ; and by the English, periwig, who afterwardscontracted or corrupted the word, into wig., At length a kind of triple-thread tresses were invented, which were sewed to ribbands, or strips of stuff, stretched out and fixed to a cawl, fastened on a block in the shape of a human head. The result of this process was. the modern wig. The first person who wore; a perruque, was a French Abbè, named La Riviere. At one time, this ornament of the head was so thick, so loaded with hair, and so long, that it hung down as low as the waist;

so that a person who had a lean visage was quite hidden by this voluminous bush of hair. The fore part of the wig was, likewise, worn very high in France; this was called devant à la Fontagne, from the marquis of that name, who had brought it into vogue in the time of Louis XIV. At length a certain man, of the name of Ervais, discovered the happy art of frizzing the wig; by which means he made a small quantity of hair assume the appearance of a respectable mass. The bagwigs came into fashion during the regency of the Duke of Orleans; and thence obtained the name of perruques à la regence. The Emperor Charles VI. would allow no one to be admitted into his presence, unless he were adorned with a wig of two tails. See Month. Mag. 1800, i. page 51. On the journey into. Spain, undertaken by Prince Charles and his precious compagnon de voyage, Buckingham, to court the Infanta, they tarried a "whole day" at Paris; where, says Sir Henry Wotton, (Life of Duke of Buck. p. 85, 2d edit.) "for the better veiling of their visages, his Highness and the. Marquis bought each of

them a periwig, somewhat to overshadow their foreheads." And to bring this sketch of the history of wigs to a close, there is a tradition, that the large black wig, which Dr. Rawlinson bequeathed, among other things, to the Bodleian library, was worn by Charles the Second.-Granger's Biog. Hist. vol. vi. page 27.

DUELLING.

Our Author, who overlooks nothing characteristic in the manners of the age in which his story engages him, has introduced into that of Kenilworth the account of a personal combat between Leicester and Tresilian, and of a rencontre of the latter gentleman with Richard Varney. They are quite in their place; for in no period of the English history were duels more frequent than in part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; nor ever conducted with so much quaint ceremony and solemn formality. The introduction of