188 THE LAST OF THE PIG-TAILS. 



world. He settled in Hull at the time when pig-tails on the head 

 were in the height of fashion. Nature had heen extremely bountiful 

 to him in the outward man. In addition to a fine commanding 

 person, he had a most luxuriant head of hair; his head seemed 

 formed for the fashion of queues, and the queue seemed formed alone 

 to grace such heads as his, and the extreme care he took in setting 

 off to the greatest advantage, what nature had thus bountifully pro- 

 \Hded, seemed to occupy most of his spare moments. Coming to 

 Hull thus recommended by nature, as well as by art, no wonder 

 that he soon attained a good practice. All men have a hobby — gi-eat 

 men never can do without one ; it often makes them great. 

 Richard had his hobby, and that was his pig-tail, and no pains were 

 spared to render it superior to any in existence ; his whole soul 

 seemed suspended there; he read everything which could in the 

 least degree throw any light on their early historj^ and had scraped 

 together so much infonnation concerning the right wearing, &c., of 

 queues, from the earliest period to his own time ; and so much did 

 he consider the future prosperity of England, as a nation, to depend 

 on what he presumed to be the dignity of a pig-tail, that he actually 

 wrote and published a voluminous work (a copy of which is now in 

 the library of the British Museum, and, probably, another copy may 

 yet be found on that shelf, so particularly dusty, in the Hull Sub- 

 scription Library) entitled " The Rise, Progress, Present State, 

 and J^uture Prospects of Queues, or Pig-Tails." This splendid pro- 

 duction at once stamped him as a literary character, and gave him 

 the right of admission, as a member of the Royal Antiquarian 

 Society, into which he was ballotted without one disentient voice. 

 This work, erudite as it undoubtedly is, enters largely into the 

 history of individual pig-tails of celebrated characters, ancient and 

 modem ; and in it he draws the deduction, that if Absalom had only 

 worn a pig-tail, and, of course, combed his hair well, which he appears 

 not to have done, he would not have got entangled in the oak tree, 

 and lost his life in the ignominious manner he did. He, also, proves 

 that the risk from drowning would be much diminished if the pig- 

 tails were worn with a portable life-buoy within them, as, in sinking, 

 a long pig- tail would, from its lightness, be the last thing above 

 water : and here we may just stop to say, that clever and ingenious 

 as the invention of our townsman Carte may be, yet his life-buoy 



