DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51519#0043
INTRODUCTION.
29
tions no slanderous wit dared to profane while living, should be
condemned to posthumous dishonour, because their pictures hang-
in the same room with those of Middleton and Denham.
It is difficult to touch upon the female influence of Charles’s
reign, without being either betrayed into an unbeseeming levity,
or assuming a tone of unseasonable severity : yet thus much may
be saidj the Memoirs, which have been collected to illustrate these
beautiful Portraits, have been written without any design of raking
up forgotten scandal, or varnishing over vice • and equally without
any presumptuous idea of benefiting the world and posterity;
but certainly not without a deep feeling of the lesson they are
fitted to convey. Virtue is scarcely virtue, till it has stood the
test: a woman who could pass through the ordeal of such a court
as that of Charles the Second unstained in person and in reputa-
tion, may be supposed to have possessed a more than common
share of innate virtue and feminine dignity; and she who stooped
to folly, at least left no temptation to others to follow her example.
When, from the picture of Castlemaine, in her triumphant beauty,
we turn to her last years and her death, there lies in that transition
a deeper moral than in twenty sermons: let woman lay it to her
heart.
* % # # #
But a lighter and gayer subject demands the pen. The obvious
connexion between beauty and dress, and the influence of the
reigning fashions upon the style of the portrait-painter, render it
necessary to say a few words of the costume of Charles the
Second’s time, as illustrative of the following Portraits and
Memoirs.
At the period of the Bestoration, and for some years afterwards,
the style of dress retained something of the picturesque elegance
of Charles the First’s time. French fashions prevailed indeed,
more or less, during the whole of the succeeding reign : French
tailors, milliners, hairdressers, and tire-women were then, as now,
29
tions no slanderous wit dared to profane while living, should be
condemned to posthumous dishonour, because their pictures hang-
in the same room with those of Middleton and Denham.
It is difficult to touch upon the female influence of Charles’s
reign, without being either betrayed into an unbeseeming levity,
or assuming a tone of unseasonable severity : yet thus much may
be saidj the Memoirs, which have been collected to illustrate these
beautiful Portraits, have been written without any design of raking
up forgotten scandal, or varnishing over vice • and equally without
any presumptuous idea of benefiting the world and posterity;
but certainly not without a deep feeling of the lesson they are
fitted to convey. Virtue is scarcely virtue, till it has stood the
test: a woman who could pass through the ordeal of such a court
as that of Charles the Second unstained in person and in reputa-
tion, may be supposed to have possessed a more than common
share of innate virtue and feminine dignity; and she who stooped
to folly, at least left no temptation to others to follow her example.
When, from the picture of Castlemaine, in her triumphant beauty,
we turn to her last years and her death, there lies in that transition
a deeper moral than in twenty sermons: let woman lay it to her
heart.
* % # # #
But a lighter and gayer subject demands the pen. The obvious
connexion between beauty and dress, and the influence of the
reigning fashions upon the style of the portrait-painter, render it
necessary to say a few words of the costume of Charles the
Second’s time, as illustrative of the following Portraits and
Memoirs.
At the period of the Bestoration, and for some years afterwards,
the style of dress retained something of the picturesque elegance
of Charles the First’s time. French fashions prevailed indeed,
more or less, during the whole of the succeeding reign : French
tailors, milliners, hairdressers, and tire-women were then, as now,