The barbers were as cunning in variety as the tailors.  Sometimes the head was polled; sometimes the hair was curled, and then suffered to grow long like a woman’s locks, and many times cut off, above or under the ears, round as by a wooden dish.  And so with the beards:  some shaved from the chin, like the Turks; some cut short, like the beard of the Marquis Otto; some made round, like a rubbing-brush; some peaked, others grown long.  If a man have a lean face, the Marquis Otto’s cut makes it broad; if it be platterlike, the long, slender beard makes it seem narrow; “if he be weasel-beaked, then much hair left on the cheeks will make the owner look big like a bowdled hen, and so grim as a goose.”  Some courageous gentlemen wore in their ears rings of gold and stones, to improve God’s work, which was otherwise set off by monstrous quilted and stuffed doublets, that puffed out the figure like a barrel.

There is some consolation, though I don’t know why, in the knowledge that writers have always found fault with women’s fashions, as they do today.  Harrison says that the women do far exceed the lightness of the men; “such staring attire as in time past was supposed meet for light housewives only is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons.”  And he knows not what to say of their doublets, with pendant pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts; their “galligascons,” to make their dresses stand out plumb round; their farthingales and divers colored stockings.  “I have met,” he says, “with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to determine whether they were men or women.”  Of all classes the merchants were most to be commended for rich but sober attire; “but the younger sort of their wives, both in attire and costly housekeeping, cannot tell when and how to make an end, as being women indeed in whom all kind of curiosity is to be found and seen.”  Elizabeth’s time, like our own, was distinguished by new fashionable colors, among which are mentioned a queer greenish-yellow, a pease-porridge-tawny, a popinjay of blue, a lusty gallant, and the “devil in the hedge.”  These may be favorites still, for aught I know.

Mr. Furnivall quotes a description of a costume of the period, from the manuscript of Orazio Busino’s “Anglipotrida.”  Busino was the chaplain of Piero Contarina, the Venetian ambassador to James I, in 1617.  The chaplain was one day stunned with grief over the death of the butler of the embassy; and as the Italians sleep away grief, the French sing, the Germans drink, and the English go to plays to be rid of it, the Venetians, by advice, sought consolation at the Fortune Theatre; and there a trick was played upon old Busino, by placing him among a bevy of young women, while the concealed ambassador and the secretary enjoyed the joke.  “These theatres,” says Busino, “are frequented by a number of respectable and handsome ladies, who come freely and seat themselves among the men without the slightest