The Puritans--Their Dress and Manners

In the matter of dress and manners, the Puritan triumph has been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over to their side, and "the whirligig of time has brought about its revenge." Their canons of taste have become those of old England, and High Churchmen, who still call them roundheads and cropped ears, go about rounder-headed and closer cropped than they ever went. They held it more rational to cut the hair to a comfortable length, than to wear effeminate curls down the back; and we cut ours much shorter than they ever did. They held (with the Spaniard, then the finest gentleman in the world) that sad,—i.e. dark,—colours, above all black, were the fittest for stately and earnest gentlemen: we all, from the Tractarian to the Anythingarian, are exactly of the same opinion. They held that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a man were marks of unmanly foppishness and vanity, and so hold the finest gentlemen in England now. They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a man to carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in reds, blues, and greens, ribands, knots, sashes, and "tripple quadruple dcodalian, ruffs, built up on iron and timber (a fact), which have more arches in them for pride, than London Bridge for use:" we, if we met such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to swagger by hundreds up and down Paul's Walk, not knowing how to get a dinner, much less to pay his tailor, should look on him firstly, as a fool, and, secondly, a swindler; while if we met an old Puritan, we should consider him a man, gracefully and picturesquely dressed, but withal in the most perfect sobriety and good taste; and when we discovered (as we probably should), over and above, that the harlequin cavalier had a box of salve and a pair of dice in one pocket, a pack of cards and a few pawnbrokers' duplicates in the other; that his thoughts were altogether of citizen's wives and their too easy virtue; and that he could not open his mouth without a dozen oaths, we should consider the Puritan (even though he did quote Scripture somewhat through his nose), as the gentlemen, and the courtier as a most offensive specimen of the "snob triumphant," glorying in his shame.--The North British Review