By hanging a stiff black tail behind,
Instead of a flowing beard before.
As if, by this 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 christen the writers of this school, "the Pigtail Poets."[1]
The first French Revolution made an end of all this trumpery, and though Alison and other professed historians 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
