the patens and
chalices used in churches were made by horners, and at one time cups,
plates, and other vessels made of that useful material were in daily use
in English homes.

IX

THE TOILET TABLE

[Illustration: FIG. 64.--ANTIQUE DRESSING OR TOILET GLASS.

(_In the Victoria and Albert Museum._)]

CHAPTER IX

THE TOILET TABLE

The table and its secrets--Combs--Patch boxes--Enamelled
objects--Perfume boxes and holders--Dressing
cases--Scratchbacks--Toilet chatelaines--Locks of hair--Jewel
cabinets.

The mysteries of the toilet table are sometimes revealed in the curious
furnishings of the dressing-room. The numerous accessories which are
purchased from the beauty specialist, and as the result of speciously
worded and attractively illustrated advertisements, in the present day,
indicate that it is not at all unlikely that the fashions of all ages
have demanded a plentiful supply of toilet requisites in order that the
Society beauty might vie with her nearest rival. The curio collector is
not so much concerned with the cosmetics, salves, pomades, and hair
washes and dyes, the use of which has called forth receptacles for them,
as with the choice boxes, cases, and implements of the tonsorial art
which their use involved.

To search for such things and to secure some hitherto unknown instrument
or receptacle is ever the ambition of the energetic curio hunter. The
field is large enough, for such curios are found in the tombs of the
prehistoric dead, and among the household gods of the primitive savage
in the few remaining unexplored inhabited countries to-day. Such objects
may with a fair prospect of success be looked for among the relics of
Assyrian and Egyptian races, and among the bronze curios of Ancient
Greece and Rome; and excavations reveal relics of Saxon and mediaeval
England among the ruins which have been covered up for centuries.

Coming down the ages, the mysteries of the toilet table, as pictured in
the not always refined engravings of the copper-plate artists of a
century or so ago, tell of habits and conditions prevailing among the
ladies of Society then which would hardly be deemed polite and refined
now.

Ladies who used patches and cosmetics and dressed their hair in such a
mode that it was rarely let down and brushed, needed many accessories
now obsolete. Moreover, the gradual change which passed over Society,
and the privacy of the modern toilet as compar