t 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 sex 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 butterfly-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 wel