Customs and Fashions in Old New England Part 19

Thos. Browns Works from a gentleman she is well acquainted with."

There was not the redeeming excuse for non-return sometimes given by like "desuming deadheads" nowadays, that the owner's name had been forgotten, for the inscription "Perley Morse, His Book," or "Catey Bradford, Her Book," or whatever the name might be, was quickly and repeatedly written by each colonial owner as soon as the book was acquired.

Frequently also the dates and places of residence appear. Even the very dates of ownership and the quaint old names are interesting. Bathsheba Spalding, Noca Emmons, Elam Noyes, t.i.therming Layton, Engrossed b.u.mp, Sally Box, Tilly Minching, Zerushaddi Key, Comfort Vine--these are a few of the odd signatures I have found in old books.

Readers also had a pleasant habit of leaving a sign-manual on the last page of a book, thus: "Timothy Pitkin perlegit A.D. 1765," "Cotton Smith perlegit 1740." A clear-speaking lesson are such records to this generation--a lesson of patience and diligence. How we venerate, with what awe we regard the name of Timothy Pitkin, and know that he lived to read through that vast folio--the first ever printed in America--the "Complete Body of Divinity," a folio of over nine hundred double-columned, compactly printed pages! And yet, why should not Timothy Pitkin live through reading it when Samuel Willard lived through writing it? Entries of dates in old Bibles frequently show that those sainted old Christians had read entirely through that holy book ten times in regular order.

The handwriting in all these ancient books is very different from our modern penmanship, invariably bearing an appearance not exactly of much labor, but of much care, as if the writer did not use a pen every day--did not become too familiar with that weighty implement, and hence had a vast respect for it when he did take it in hand. Every _t_ is crossed, every _i_ is dotted, every _a_ and _o_ perfectly rounded, every tail of every _g_ and _y_ and _z_ is precisely twisted in colonial script. I think the very trouble and preparation incident to writing conduced to the finish and elegance of the penmanship. No stylographic pens were used in those days, but instead, a carefully prepared quill; and the ink was made of ink-cake or ink-powder dissolved in water; or, more troublesome still, home-made ink, tediously prepared with nutgalls, walnut or swamp maple bark, or iron filings steeped in vinegar and water, or copperas.

Special pains were taken in writing a name in a book. Penmanship was almost a fine art in colonial days, the one indispensable accomplishment of a school teacher; and he was often hired to exercise it in writing a name "perspicuously" in a book. Sometimes the owner's name is seen drawn with much care in a little wreath or circle of ornamentation. This may be what Judge Sewall refers to with so much pride when he speaks of "writing a name" in a gift-book, or it may be what was known as "conceits" or "fine knotting."

The colonists had a very reprehensible habit, which (save for the pains taken in writing) might be called book-scribbling. Rude rhymes and sentiments are often found with the past owner's name, and form a t.i.tle-page lore which, ill-spelt and simple as the verses are, have an interest to the antiquary of which the writer never dreamed. They consist chiefly of adjurations to honesty, specially with regard to the special volume thus inscribed:

"Steal not this book my honest friend, For fear the gallows will be your End."

"If you dare to steal this Book The Devil will catch you on his Hook."

This was accompanied by the outline of a very spirited "personal devil"

with a pitchfork and an enormous gridiron.

Still another appealed to terrors:

"This is Hanah Moxon Her book You may just within it Look You had better not do more For old black Satan's at the Door And will s.n.a.t.c.h at stealing hands Look behind you! There He Stands."

This had a tail-piece of an open door with a very black forked tail thrust out of it.

In a leather-bound Bible was seen this rhyme:

"Evert Jonson His book G.o.d Give him Grase thair in to look not only to looke but to understand that Larning is better than Hous or Land When Land is Gon & Gold is spent then larning is most Axelant When I am dead & Rotton If this you see Remember me Though others is forgotton."

Different portions of this script have been seen in many books.

Four rhymes seem to be specially the property of schoolboys, being found in Accidences, Spellers, "Logick" Primers, and other school-books, down even to the present day.

"This book is one thing, My fist's another, If you touch the one thing, You'll feel the other."

"Hic liber eat meus And that I will show Si aliquis capit I'll give him a blow."

"This book is mine By Law Divine And if it runs astray I'll call you kind My desk to find And put it safe away."

"Hic liber est meus Deny it who can Zenas Graves Junior An honest man."

There also appears a practical warning which may be read with attention and profit by the public now a days:

"If thou art borrowed by a friend Right welcome shall he be To read, to study, _not_ to lend But to _return_ to me.

"Not that imparted knowledge doth Diminish Learnings Store But books I find if often lent Return to me no more."

"Read _Slowly_--Pause _Frequently_--Think _Seriously_--Finger _Lightly_--Keep _Cleanly_--Return _Duly_--with the _Corners_ of the Leaves NOT TURNED DOWN."

The fashion of using book-plates was by no means so general among New England Puritans as among rich Virginians and New Yorkers and Pennsylvanian Quakers. Mr. Lichtenstein, writing in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1886, says he has seen no New England book-plates of earlier date than 1735. At later dates the Holyokes, Dudleys, Boylstons, and Phillips, all used book-plates. The plates most familiar to students in old libraries in New England are those of the Vaughans and of Isaiah Thomas.

Another, a living interest is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, hairy; and they zigzag across the page on their ugly crooked legs in a sprawling, drunken fashion. They do not eat the books; they live apparently on air; yet if you crush them between the pages they leave a stain of vivid scarlet to reproach you in future readings for your needless cruelty. I cannot kill them; though flaming is their blood's rebuke, it is aristocratically as well as theologically blue. In their veins runs the ichor--arachnidian though it be--that came over in the Mayflower; yes, doubly honored, came over in the special stateroom of an Ainsworth's Psalm-Book or a Genevan Bible. No degrading alliances, no admixtures through foreign emigration, have crossed that pure inbred strain; my book-spiders are of real Pilgrim stock--they are true New England Brahmins.

Any one who turns over with attention the books of an old New England library must be struck with a sense of the affection with which these books have been treasured, the care with which they have been read, and, in case of accident, with which they have been repaired. One psalm-book, nibbled by mice, has had every page neatly mended by the insertion of thin sheets of paper to replace the lost bits; and some painstaking and pious New Englander, with a pen and skill worthy the illuminating monks of another faith, has minutely printed the missing letters on both sides of the inserted slip in a text no larger than the surrounding print.

Another book, a Bible, burnt in round holes by a slow-burning coal from the pipe of a sleepy reader, has been mended in the same careful manner.

I have seen Bibles that have been read and turned over till the margins of the pages at the lower corner and outer edge were worn off down to the print by loving daily use. In one such the margins had been neatly replaced by pasted slips of paper. In more than one book I have found a minutely written home-made index on the blank pages at the end of the volume, showing a personal interest and love for a book which can hardly be equalled. Careful notes and references and postils also show a patient and appreciative perusal.

Though books were so closely cherished, so seemly bekept in colonial days, they were subject to one indignity with which now they are unmenaced and undegraded--they were sometimes sentenced to be burned by the public hangman. In 1654 the writings of John Reeves and Ludowick Muggleton, who set up to be prophets, were burned by that abhorred public functionary in Boston market-place; and two years later Quaker books were similarly destroyed. William Pyncheon's book was burned, in 1650, in Boston Market. In 1707 a "libel on the Governor" was hanged by the hangman. In 1754 a pamphlet called "The Monster of Monsters," a sharp political criticism on the Ma.s.sachusetts Court, was thus burned in King Street, Boston. From the _Connecticut Gazette_ of November 29th, 1755, we learn that another offending publication was sentenced to be "publickly whipt according to Moses Law with 40 stripes save one, then Burnt." How a true book-lover winces at the thought of the public hangman placing his blood-stained hand on any book, no matter how much a "monster."

XII

"ARTIFICES OF HANDSOMENESS"

From the earliest days the Puritan colonists fought stoutly, for the sake of St. Paul, against long hair. They proved themselves worthy the opprobrious name of Roundhead. Endicott's first act was to inst.i.tute a solemn and insistent a.s.sociation against long hair. This wearing of long locks was one of the existing evils, a wile of the devil, which bade fair to creep into New England, and in its incipiency was proceeded against by the General Court, "that the men might not wear long hair like women's hair." The ministers preached bitterly and incessantly against the fashion; the Apostle Eliot, Parson Stoddard, Parson Rogers, President Chauncey, President Wigglesworth, all launched burning invective and skilful Biblical argument against the long-growing locks--"the disguis.e.m.e.nt of long Ruffianly hair" (or Russianly--whichever it may be). It was derisively suggested that long nails like Nebuchadnezzar's would next be in fashion. Men under sentence for offences were offered release from punishment if they would "cut off their long hair into a civil frame." Exact rules were given from the pulpit as to the properly Puritan length--that the hair should not lie over the neck, the band, or the doublet collar; in the winter it might be suffered to grow a little below the ear for warmth. Personal pride and dignity were appealed to, that no Christian gentleman would wish to look like "every Ruffian, every wild-Irish, every hangman, every varlet and vagabond." By Sewall's time, however, Puritan though he were, we see his white locks flowing long over his doublet collar, and forming a fitting frame to his serene, benignant countenance.

Puritan women also were not above reproach in regard to the fashion of extravagant hair-dressing; they also "showed the vile note of impudency." One parson thus severely addressed them from the pulpit: "The special sin of woman is pride and haughtiness, and that because they are generally more ignorant and worthless," and he added that this feminine pride vented itself in gesture, hair, behavior, and apparel. I fear all this was true, for the Court also complained of my ignorant and worthless s.e.x for "cutting and curling and laying out of the hair, especially among the younger sort." Increase Mather gave them this thrust in his sermon on the comet, in 1683: "Will not the haughty daughters of Zion refrain their pride in apparell? Will they lay out their hair, and wear their false locks, their borders, and towers like comets about their heads?" And they were called "Apes of Fancy, friziling and curlying of their hayr."

I think the sober and decorous women settlers must have worn their hair cut straight across the forehead, like our modern "bangs;" for Higginson, writing of the Indians in 1692, says: "Their hair is generally black and cut before like our gentlewomen." The false locks denounced by Mather were doubtless "a pair of Perukes which are pretty"

of Pepys's time, about 1656; or the "heart breakers" worn in 1670, which set out like b.u.t.terfly-wings over the ears, and which were described thus: "False locks set on wyers to make them stand at a distance from the head."

From a letter written by Knollys to Cecil we learn that Mary Queen of Scots wore these perukes. He says:

"Mary Seaton among other pretty devices yesterday and this day, she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that was said to be a Peruke, that showed very delicately, and every other day she hath a new device of head dressing without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaylie well."

The "towers like comets" were doubtless commodes, which were in high fashion in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century until about the year 1711, though I have never found that the word commode was used in America. These commodes were enormously high frames of wire covered with thin silk, or plaitings of muslin or lace, or frills of ribbon--and sadly belied their name.

A simpler form of hair-dressing succeeded the commode; portraits painted during the following half-century, such as those of Copley, Smibert, and Blackburn, show an elegant and graceful form of coiffure, the hair brushed back and raised slightly from the forehead, and sometimes curled loosely behind the ears. At a later date the curls were almost universally surmounted by a lace cap. Pomatum began to be used by the middle of the century. In the _Boston News Letter_ of 1768, we read of "Black White and Yellow Pomatum from six Coppers to Two Shillings per Roll." The hair was frequently powdered. Hair-dressers sold powdering puffs and powdering bags and powdering machines, and a dozen different varieties of hair-powder--brown, marechal, scented, plain, and blue. By Revolutionary times a new tower, or "talematongue," had arisen; the front hair was pulled up over a stuffed cushion or roll, and mixed with powder and grease; the back hair was strained up in loops or short curls, surrounded and surmounted with ribbons, pompons, aigrettes, jewels, gauze, and flowers and feathers, till the structure was half a yard in height. This fashion was much admired by some; a young lover of the day wrote thus sentimentally of a fair Hartford girl: "Her hair covered her cushion as a plate of the most beautiful enamel frosted with silver." A Revolutionary soldier wrote a poem, however, which regarded from a different point of view this elaborate headgear in such a time of national depression. His rhymes began thus:

"Ladies you had better leave off your high rolls Lest by extravagance you lose your poor souls Then haul out the wool, and likewise the tow 'Twill clothe our whole army we very well know."

The "Dress-a-la-Independance" was a style of hair-dressing with thirteen curls at the neck, thus to honor the thirteen new States.

In the year 1771 Anna Green Winslow wrote in her diary an account of one of these elaborate hair-dressings which she then saw. She ends her description thus:

"How long she was under his opperation I know not. I saw him twist & tug & pick & cut off whole locks of gray hair at a slice, the lady telling him he would have no hair to dress next time, for a s.p.a.ce of an hour and a half, when I left them he seeming not to be near done."

She also gives a most sprightly account of the manufacture of a roll for her own hair:

"I had my HEDDUS roll on. Aunt Storer said it ought to be made less, Aunt Deming said it ought not to be made at all. It makes my head ach and burn and itch like anything Mama. This famous Roll is not made wholly of a Red-Cow Tail but is a mixture of that & horsehair very coa.r.s.e & a little human hair of a yellow hue that I suppose was taken out of the back part of an old wig. But D. (the barber) made it, all carded together and twisted up. When it first came home, Aunt put it on, and my new cap upon it; she then took up her ap.r.o.n and measured me & from the roots of my hair on my forehead to the top of my notions I measured above an inch longer than I did downward from the roots of my hair to the end of my chin. Nothing renders a young person more amiable than Virtue and Modesty without the help of fals hair, Red-Cow tail or D. the barber."

The _Boston Gazette_ had, in 1771, a ludicrous description of an accident to a young woman in the streets of that town. In an infaust moment she was thrown down by a runaway, and her tower received serious damage. It burst its thin outer wall of natural hair, and disgorged cotton and wool and tow stuffing, false hair, loops of ribbon and gauze.

Ill-bred boys kicked off portions of the various excrescences, and the tower-wearer was jeered at until she was glad to escape with her own few natural locks.

A New England clergyman--Mana.s.seh Cutler--wrote thus of the head-dress of Mrs. General Knox in 1787: