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By hanging a stiff black tail behind,
Instead of a flowing beard before,
As if, by tins ensign, the world to remind,
How wise it had grown since old father Noah.
This was the period when every breeze was a Zephyr,
every maid a Chloe, every woman a Venus, and every fat
squinting child a Cupid! Later German critics even chris-
ten the writers of this school, "the Pigtail Poets."*
The first French Eevolution made an end of all this
trumpery, and though Alison and other professed histori-
ans have not classed the event among the good things
flowing from that fearful flood of blood and blasphemy,
it was not one of the least, and society cannot rejoice too
much at being delivered from the example of systematic
frippery, frivolity, and tricked-out vice of the later French
Sovereigns, imitated as they were by most of the petty
puppet Princes of Germany—
Each lesser ape in his small way,
Playing his antics like the greater.
About the rise of the first Napoleon to power, a more
simple, severe, and classic taste, was beginning to prevail,
and this dictated a return to the Beard. Under the
military despotism, however, of that Emperor, moustaches
were forbidden to civilians, and the Beard restrained to
that petty, hairy imitation of a reversed triangle—called
* Senme, a German poet of a better school, in his travels says.
"To-day I threw my powder apparatus out of window, when will the
day come that I can send my shaving apparatus after it!"
