“With drink-off’rings and locks of hair we must,
  According to his will, his tomb adorn.”

Candace in Ovid bewails her calamity, in that she was not permitted to adorn her lover’s tomb with her locks.

At Patroclus’s funeral, the Grecians, to show their affection and respect to him, covered his body with their hair; Achilles cast it into the funeral pile.  The custom of nourishing the hair on religious accounts seems to have prevailed in most nations.  Osiris, the Egyptian, consecrated his hair to the gods, as we learn from Diodorus; and in Arian’s account of India, it appears it was a custom there to preserve their hair for some god, which they first learnt (as that author reports) from Bacchus.

The Greeks and Romans wore false hair.  It was esteemed a peculiar honour among the ancient Gauls to have long hair.  For this reason Julius Caesar, upon subduing the Gauls, made them cut off their hair, as a token of submission.  In the royal family of France, it was a long time the peculiar mark and privilege of kings and princes of the blood to wear long hair, artfully dressed and curled; every body else being obliged to be polled, or cut round, in sign of inferiority and obedience.  In the eighth century, it was the custom of people of quality to have their children’s hair cut the first time by persons they had a particular honour and esteem for, who, in virtue of this ceremony, were reputed a sort of spiritual parents or godfathers to them.  In the year 1096, there was a canon, importing, that such as wore long hair should be excluded coming into church when living, and not be prayed for when dead.  Charlemagne wore his hair very short, his son shorter; Charles the Bald had none at all.  Under Hugh Capet it began to appear again; this the ecclesiastics were displeased with, and excommunicated all who let their hair grow.  Peter Lombard expostulated the matter so warmly with Charles the Young, that he cut off his own hair; and his successors, for some generations, wore it very short.  A professor of Utrecht, in 1650, wrote expressly on the question, Whether it be lawful for men to wear long hair? and concluded for the negative.  Another divine, named Reeves, who had written for the affirmative, replied to him.  In New England a declaration was inscribed in the register of the colony against the practice of wearing long hair, which was principally levelled at the Quakers, with unjust severity.

P.T.W.

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Pagoda in Kew Gardens.

[Illustration:  Pagoda in Kew Gardens.]