MAN, MANNERS, AND A STORY WITH A MORAL TO IT.
“Les hommes font les lois, les femmes font les mœurs.”—De Ségue.
“L’homme est un animal!” said a French orator, by way of peroration to his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies; “Man is an animal!”—and there he stopped. He found his subject exhausted, and he sat down in confusion. Thereupon his own familiar friend arose, and suggested that it was desirable that the honourable gentleman’s speech should be printed, with a portrait of the author!
The definition is, as far as it goes, a plagiarism from Plato. In the Apophthegmata of Diogenes Laertius, it is stated that Plato defined Man as an animal with two legs and without feathers. The definition having been generally approved of, Diogenes went into the school of the philosopher, carrying with him a cock, which he had stripped of his plumage. “Here,” said he, “is Plato’s man!” Plato saw that his definition needed improvement, and he added to it “with broad nails.” He might have further said, “and needing something in place of feathers.”
So much depends upon this substitute, and so much more is thought of habits than of manners,—that is, morals,—and of the makers of the former than the teachers of the latter, that it is popularly and properly said, “The tailor makes the man.” No doubt of it; and tailors are far better paid than tutors. The Nugees keep country-houses and recline in carriages; the philosophers are accounted of as nugæ, and plod on foot to give golden instruction for small thanks and a few pence. Their device, if they are ever so ennobled as to be thought worthy of one, might be that of the patriotic ladies of Prussia, who, before the time when their country became a satrapy of Muscovy, exchanged their golden adornments for an iron ring, on which was engraved the legend, “Ich gab Gold um Eisen,”—I gave gold for iron.
This being the case, it is little to be wondered at that man is more careful about his dress than his instruction. The well-dressed man looks, at all events, like a man well to do; and how profound is the respect of the world for a man who may be catalogued as “well to do!” That man thoroughly understood the meaning of the term who, when on his trial for murder, and anticipating an acquittal, invited his counsel to dinner. The invitation was accepted, but, the verdict rendering the inviter incapable of even ordering a dinner for himself, the intended guest frowned on the convict, and went and dined with the prosecutor.
Philosophy has done its best to cure man of vanity in dress; but philosophy has been vain,—and so has man. “For a man to be fantastic and effeminate in attire,” says Stobæus, “is unpardonable. It is next to Sardanapalus’s spinning among women. To such I would say, Art thou not ashamed, when Nature hath made thee a man, to make thyself a woman?”
Seneca hath something to the same purpose, and not altogether inapplicable in our days. “Some of the manly sex amongst us,” says he, “are so effeminate, that they would rather have the commonwealth out of order, than their hair; they are more solicitous about trimming and sprucing up their heads, than they are of their health or of the safety of the public; and are more anxious to be fine than virtuous.” Sir Walter Raleigh asserts that “No man is esteemed for gay garments, but by fools and women,”—an assertion which shows that his philosophy and his civility were both in a ragged condition. Sir Matthew Hale throws the blame where it ought to be borne, when he declares that the vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashions, and valuing ourselves by them, is one of the most childish pieces of folly that can be.
The philosophy of the judge is “truer steel” than that of the soldier. But, for philosophy in describing a dress, I know nothing that can surpass that of the poor Irishman, who, looking down at his own garment of million tatters, smilingly said that it was “made of holes.”
There is very good philosophy in the story of Nessus and his tunic. We all know how the story is told in history, and that it therefore cannot be true. Apollodorus and Pausanias, Diodorus, Ovid, and Seneca, have all told the same tale, without guessing at the truth which lies hid in it. It is to this effect:—When Hercules was on his way to the court of Ceyx, king of Trachinia, in company with his “lady,” Dejanira, the travellers came to the swollen river of Evenus. Nessus, the centaur, politely carried the lady over, and became very rude to her on the opposite bank. The stalwart husband, from the other shore, observing what was going on, sent one of his shafts, dipped in the poison of the Lernæan Hydra, right into the centaur’s heart. Nessus, while dying, presented his shirt,—that is, his tunic,—to Dejanira, informing her that if she could persuade Hercules to wear it, he would never behave to her otherwise than as a gentleman. Now, as he never had yet so comported himself—for he was a dreadful bully—Dejanira accepted the gift; and, as the hero was soon after found flirting with his old love Iole, and was vain of his appearance, she sent the gay garment to him, and he had no sooner donned it than death clasped him, and the hero was transferred to where there were so many other powerful rascals,—the halls of Olympus. So much for fiction, and those never-to-be-trusted poets. Here is the truth.
Nessus was a ridiculous old dandy, with a juvenile wig and reprobate principles. He courted Hercules’ “lady,” and so flattered her that she became fonder than ever of fashionable garments, and even accepted a shawl from the centaur, who had ordered it in the name of the husband, and left him to pay for it. Hercules forgot his vexation in the beaux yeux of Iole; and remembering how the “old beast,” as he used to call the centaur, had contrived to sun himself in Dejanira’s eyes, he adopted the fashion of Nessus; and, lightly as nymphs were dressed in the days of Iole, he ran up a right royal bill at the milliner’s, and no more thought of what he should have to pay than the Duke of York, when ordering cashmeres for Anna Maria Clarke. The fall of the year however came, and therewith the “little account,” with an intimation that a speedy settlement would oblige. Hercules, hero as he was, felt his heart fail him as he looked at “the tottle of the whole,” and he fell into such extravagances that, being hunted to death by bailiffs, and his honesty as small as that of the proprietor of an ultra-pietist paper who cheats his editor, he took the benefit of the act, and retired to the country, where he kept a shabby chariot, drawn by only two mangy leopards, and ultimately died, like other heroes, bewailing his amiable weaknesses.
But let us go further back than to mythology, in order to examine the origin of dress.
It may be said (and I hope without profanity) that sewing came in with sin; or rather, it was one of the first consequences of the first crime. Perhaps, for this reason, has a certain degree of contempt been inherited by the professors of the art. The trade of a tailor is not honoured with mention in any part of the Scriptures. Gardening was the early occupation, and hence horticulture is accounted refined. Tubal Cain was the first worker in iron; and from his time down to a very late period, the employment which required much exercise of muscular strength had the precedence of mere sedentary callings. The French, indeed, as becomes a nation which prides itself as being the most particular touching the external dressing of a man, has always confessed to a sort of tender regard for the tailor. The vocation against which Gallic wits direct their light-winged shafts, is that of the grocer. The épicier with them is a man whose soul does not rise above lait de poule and cotton nightcaps. He is generally the coward in farces, while heroism is not made separable from the melancholy wielders of the needle.
In France however we may still trace a remnant of the time when the highest honour was awarded to the pliers of the heaviest tools, or the workmen whose vocation had a spice of peril in it. Thus the farrier smith, in France, still enjoys a courtesy rank which places him on a nominal equality with the tried commanders of valiant hosts; and if Soult was Marshal of France, so every Gallic farrier is “maréchal ferrant”—the marshal of the workers in iron.
As weavers and fullers are noticed in Holy Writ, while the tailor is passed over in silence, it is probable that he had no distinct status among the Jews, and that, during a long period at least, every man was his own costumier. In other countries the tailor and the physician were both slaves, and probably the first was as little or less of a bungler than the second; for the servus vestiarius could often improve the outer man, when the servus medicus could not do as much for the inner one.
Under the old dispensation, sewing, as I have said, followed sin; and he who forged a bill-hook or a brand was in higher esteem than he who lived by the exercise of the needle. Under a later dispensation we find examples of this order of precedency being reversed. Lydia of Thyatira was among the first who joined Paul in prayer, by the riverside at Philippi. Her office was to make up into garments the purple cloth for which Lydia itself was famous. With this proselyte Paul dwelt, and on her he left a blessing. It was not so with a certain strong handicraftsman. When Paul was once at the point of death he bethought him of an old vicious adversary, and said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works!” And by this we not only see that he who taught so wisely could sometimes err against his own instructions, but we may even make this strange circumstance profitable to us by viewing in it the proof that even the nearest to heaven are not entirely free from the stains of earth; and that the spirit truly worthy of immortality has never yet been found in aught that was mortal.
And this reminds me, that while every Jew learned some trade, there is none recorded as having learned that of a tailor. The coppersmiths endeavour to disconnect their calling from the excommunication of Paul, by asserting that the Alexander who did evil to Paul, by maligning him and by broaching heresies upon the resurrection, was really a philosopher, who was only a coppersmith for his amusement. This however is not likely, for it was not usual to designate learned men by the name of their adopted trades. And however this may be, it was Lydia the maker of purple vests who obtained the blessing, while Alexander the coppersmith inherited the curse.
And may I here remark,—for I hope to be permitted to indulge in a good deal of “cross stitch” in these unpretending sketches,—that the best of men of modern times can, like St. Paul, be vigorously minded against their opponents. I will only cite Cowper, who was more wrathful than the Apostle, without the provocation by which the latter was judicially moved.
Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets. He is elevated in his ‘Table Talk;’ acute in detailing the ‘Progress of Error;’ and he chants the praises of ‘Truth’ in more dulcet notes than were ever sounded by the fairest swan in Cayster. His ‘Expostulation’ is made in the tones of a benevolent sage. His ‘Hope’ and his ‘Charity’ are proofs of his pure Christian-like feeling;—a feeling which also pervades his ‘Conversation’ and his ‘Retirement,’ and which barbs the shafts of his satire without taking away from their strength. The same praise is due to the six books of the ‘Task,’ of which perhaps the Garden is the least successful portion. If however we be disposed to find fault at all with anything in his sentiment or expression, it would be in this,—that while he celebrates in warm praises the delights of his own peaceful and retired life—a life which, on the respectable authority of the old medical writer Celsus, I may call as hurtful to the body as it is profitable or necessary to the mind (“Literarum disciplina, ut animo præcipue omnium necessaria, sic corpori inimica est”), there is some illiberality in his declaring that the various occupations of other and more active men are either frivolous or criminal. Cowper patiently enjoys holding the ravelled thread for ladies to wind it on to their bobbins, but he sneers at the party who sits down to chess or stands up to billiards. He will praise air and exercise, if you will only take them in company with him, in covered walks where there is what he so well and quaintly calls
“An obsolete prolixity of shade.”
But if you enjoy your air and exercise in field sports, you are more ignoble than your groom, and a greater brute than the victim you pursue. Again: he acknowledges change of scene to be beneficial to the animal economy; but he intends thereby a change from one parish to another. You must not go to France for change, without being undeniably anything but a gentleman and a Christian. He is ready too to eat game and dine on venison, but he would not, for the world, be so guilty as to course a hare or shoot a buck. Finally, he would listen with all imaginable pleasure and rapture to the strains of Handel, were they only composed to the glory and praise of Damon and Dolly, rather than, as they are, to the eulogy of the Messiah and in illustration of His sacrifice.
But why, it may be asked, this piece of patchwork with Cowper’s name thereon? Well, Cowper was something of a tailor in his way, and could sew a button on his sleeve as adroitly, if not as any tailor in town, at least as any sailor in the fleet. And in this he was something akin to Pope Pius VII. when prisoner at Fontainebleau.
What a heavy captivity was that!—not so much for the prisoner, as for those who were compelled to listen to the long and dreary and pointless stories of the good-natured and weak old man. When the officers who had this Pope in charge, were conducting him from Rome to Paris, they on one occasion shut him up in a coach-house, where he remained seated in his carriage, while his captors dined. Cardinal Pacca says of this Pope, who was an admirable tailor when necessity pressed him, that, during the eighteen months he was resident at Fontainebleau, he could never be prevailed upon to quit his own suite of apartments. He, and the Cardinals who accompanied him, were employed in conjugating the verb s’ennuyer. He loved a little gossip, and hated books; but the captive had a solace—one worthy of the dignity of Diocletian, when he cultivated cabbages. Savary, Duke de Rovigo, who was chief gaoler over the chief Pontiff, says, of the latter, that “he did not open a book the livelong day; and he occupied himself in things which, if I had not myself seen, I never should have believed; stitching and mending, for instance, holes and rents in his clothes, sewing a button on his breeches, and washing with his own hands his dressing-gown, on which he had a habit of allowing his snuff to fall in large quantities.” Savary is especially, and naturally, astonished that the supreme Pontiff preferred his amateur tailoring to enjoying the books in the great library of Fontainebleau. Poor man! he did not like reading, but he did like killing time at the point of the needle. The tailors of his community are doubtless proud of such a patron. The story rests on Savary’s authority; and while Cardinal Pacca abuses him for telling it, his Eminence does not deny its authenticity.
But we must not allow the Pope and his pursuits to take us away from the consideration of sacred things. Reverting therefore to the Jews, it may be said of them that if they did not possess the tailor as a professor, they had a sufficient variety of dress to perplex the domestic ministers of fashion. There is quite as much perplexity for those who have to write about it. The Jews, like the modern children of the Prophet, would not tolerate the representation of any living figure, and the antiquary has therefore no chance of consulting a Hebrew ‘Journal des Modes.’ The monuments of nations distant from Palestine cannot be accepted as authority when they are said to represent the Jewish people, for we have no assurance that the people are thereon represented; or if they be Jews, that they are, in slavery, wearing a national costume.
Of one thing however there is a certainty. The Jews had a national costume; and, except in ceremonial dresses and some female appendages, it had very little resemblance indeed to the costume of the Egyptians. The material of Jewish garments was manufactured at home; the skilful hands of the women spinning and weaving the raw material afforded by the flocks. Not all the women appear to have been given to the useful work. There were some fine ladies among the multitude that came out of Egypt, and these had an aristocratically foolish contempt for the spinners and tailoresses of the tribes. But I would especially recommend my fair readers to remember the sacred record, which ennobles labour, where it says:—“All the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen;” and again it is said,—and it sounds like God’s blessing upon the daughters of toil,—“And all the women whose hearts stirred them up in wisdom spun goats’ hair.” No doubt these women, whose hearts were the thrones of wisdom, were primeval tailoresses. And much value was set upon the habits which they made, the shaping of which, I may add, presented little difficulty. The principal article of dress was an ample woollen garment,—a cloak by day, and a couch by night. It served two purposes, like Goldsmith’s stocking, which, at night, he drew from his feet to place on his head. Much value, I have said, was attached to this garment; as, for instance: “If thou at all take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it to him by that the sun goeth down. For that is his covering only; it is the raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? And it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.”
At Beni Hassan, in Egypt, there are some painted representations of men who are supposed to be the counterfeit presentment of Jews fresh from their own country, and therefore in undoubted Jewish costume. The men are variously attired: they are all sandalled. Some wear only short tunics, others a cloak over the tunic. This cloak or plaid, for it is of a striped and figured pattern, and is described as resembling the fine grass-woven cloth of the South Sea, is worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm, leaving the latter free for action. Other figures are clad in fringed shirts, or tunics of the same material as the plaid, reminding one of the command given unto Moses in the fifteenth chapter of Numbers: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribbon of blue.” And again, in Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself:” and it will be remembered that a formal observance of this command gave ground for censure, when the Jews were, at a later period, reproached because “all their works they do for to be seen of men; they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.”
The garments in the paintings at Beni Hassan are of the very simplest construction. The Hebrew maker of them could hardly have committed the trifling mistake made by Andrew Fern, the weather-brained tailor of Cromarty, who used, says Hugh Miller, “to do very odd things, especially when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that Andrew fabricated for him his first jacket, and that though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes!” There are no pocket-holes visible in the Jewish garments.
The Jews soon learned to enlarge their fringes. In the Valley of Bab el Malook, near Thebes, Belzoni discovered a tomb in which is represented the triumph of Pharaoh Necho, after the victory over the Jews at Megiddo. The Jews, among the captives, look very much like Highlanders, with nothing on but kilts kept down about the knees by leaded bunches of ribbons,—a fashion not unknown to modern Ballerinas, who wear “very thin clothing, and but little of it.” The captives, however, have probably been stripped of their upper garments, which the conquerors may be supposed to have sold to the tailors of Misraim, whereupon to model new fashions for the modish dwellers by the purple Nile.
The Rabbins had some curious ideas touching the original form of Adam, and the peculiar dress made for him and Eve before the Fall. Bartolozzi, in his ‘Bibliotheca Rabbinica,’ notices the tradition that the father of mankind was originally furnished with a tail, but that it was cut off by his Maker, because he looked better without it. Another tradition asserts that, before the fall, Adam and Eve had a transparent covering, a robe of light, of which remnants are left to mankind in the nails of the hands and feet. Let me add, for the sake of those who are fond of adopting primeval colours, that the original hue of the father of man is said to have been a bottle-green. When Stulz furnished Mr. Haynes with his celebrated pea-green coat, the schneider only made him as closely resembling as he could to Eliezer the Tanaite, in his bright green gabardine. And Eliezer if a good patron to tailors, and a wearer of gay colours, was also one of the most learned of men. It is said of him, that if all the firmament were changed into parchment, and the entire ocean into ink, it would not suffice to write all that he knew; for he was the author, among other brief works, of three hundred volumes, solely upon the subject of sowing cucumbers. Perhaps Stulz wished to make the wooer of Miss Foote look as like a philosopher as possible, for Eliezer was not the only sage who walked the world in verdant suit. When Amelia Opie paid her visit to Godwin in Somers’ Town, the teacher of the peoples wore over a fiery crimson waistcoat a bottle-green coat, the colour of the original man, from whom Godwin of course very much doubted whether he really were descended.
The Jews, as rather given to luxury in dress, would have been excellent patrons of the tailors, but for Christian jealousy. In Spain and Portugal, the rich Hebrews were the unqualified delight of the most orthodox of tailors—who loved to dress even more than they did to burn them. But the ultra-pietism of the Queen Regent at Valladolid, in the year 1412,—a year when the prospects of the unfortunate descendants of Israel were particularly gloomy,—put a clog upon trade, without, in any degree, accelerating religion. The counsellor of the Queen was Brother Vincent Ferrer, the inveterate enemy of the Jewish nation. The two together fulminated a decree, in the name of the infant monarch, Don John, which in substance declared that the Jews should live apart, and exercise no trade or calling that was either respectable or profitable. The tailors of Castile would not have been much troubled at this decree, for their old customers had saved money enough to make the fortunes of the entire trade, had it not been for one of the concluding clauses, which did more injury to Christians than to Jews. By these clauses Jews were forbidden to wear cloaks, and were restricted to long robes, of poor materials, over their clothes. The Jewesses were ordered to wear common mantles reaching to their feet, and with hoods to be worn over the head. Disobedience to these clauses was to be visited by “the forfeiture of all the clothes they may have on, to their under garments.” An additional clause fixed against them the canon of a sumptuary law; and no tailor dared to supply to a Jew a suit, the cloth of which cost upwards of thirty maravedis. If the tailor offended against this decree, the Church admonished him, but the law scourged the Jew. The first time a Hebrew donned a suit worth more than the thirty maravedis, he forfeited the suit, and was sent home in his shirt. For a second offence, he forfeited his entire wardrobe; but Justice kept him warm by administering to him a hundred lashes, vigorously applied by the hand of an executioner, who imagined that the more blood he drew the better Heaven would be pleased. For a third indulgence in forbidden finery the Jew was mulcted of all he possessed; “but,” says the gracious Queen Regent, “it is my pleasure that, if the Jews choose, they may make coats and cloaks of the clothes which they now possess.” How lucky for Baron Rothschild that he is not compelled, like his predecessors, to carry his cast-off clothes to his tailor, and have one new coat made out of two old garments!
The Persian Jews were as ill-content at having their tailors’ bills regulated by the Government as were those of the Peninsula. When the Persian Caliphs, who would allow nobody to be well-dressed but the faithful, closed the colleges at Babylon, and expelled the professors, it is said that nobody wept for the latter so much as the handicraftsmen who used to adorn their outward persons. Of these expelled professors, a corsair captured at sea Rabbi Moses, his handsome wife, and their son, Rabbi Hanoch. On their way to Cordova, some Tarquinian-like overtures were made to the lady, who, walking up to her husband, inquired if those drowned at sea would be resuscitated at the resurrection? The Rabbi smiled, and answered with the text:—“The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea.” Thereupon the Hebrew Lucretia plunged into the waves, and her husband into a reverie, in which the calmly-pleasant abounded.
The Jews of Cordova redeemed the other captives, and the first visit of Rabbi père was to a tailor, of whom he ordered an outfit of sackcloth. The honest man was disgusted with his customer’s taste, and valued below cost-price a philosopher who declared that his logic was always more conclusive in sackcloth than in habits spun from finer webs. Attired in his new suit, he entered the Jewish college, where a learned dispute was being carried on with equal warmth and obtuseness. A few words from the mean stranger had an effect like the sun upon a fog, and the president quitting his chair, the man in sackcloth was voted into it by acclamation. The tailor, who had followed out of curiosity, ran to the captain of the corsair, and told him that his late captive was a rare man, of whose value he had been ignorant; and therewith the captain would fain have had the sale cancelled, but the Caliph of Cordova would not listen to such a proposition. Hanoch, the son of Moses, was even more fortunate than his sire, for he espoused a daughter of the House of Peliag. Hanoch displayed such liberality on the occurrence of this union, that for a long time the corporation of tailors, whom he especially benefited on this occasion, were accustomed to name one son in their respective families after so liberal a patron of the craft. The two Jewish households on that day were long celebrated at the hearths of those who made their dresses. The wedding feast was held at Zahara, near the city, and not less than seven hundred Israelites rode thither in costumes that would have dazzled the Incas. Ask a well-to-do Cordovese tailor as to the state of his vocation, and, if he has not now forgotten the once popular legend, he will answer, “It is almost as flourishing, Sir, as in the days of Hanoch, whom our predecessors cursed as a Jew, and blessed as a customer.” It was a neatly cut distinction, and fitted exactly.
Deformity of principle, as well as deformity of person, may sometimes be the mother of Fashion. Thus it is stated by an old French writer, that “the use of great purfles and slit coates was introduced by wanton women;” but he adds, with great unction, that the fashion of these lemans had been adopted by the princesses and ladies of England; and with them he trusts that it will long remain. The same author shows how a fair lady, by following the fashion thus lightly set, became the victim of Satan himself. It must be premised that the author’s daughters had been very desirous of indulging in furred garments, and purfles, and slashed coats; and as the father saved himself from a long bill at the dressmaker’s by telling the following story, I calculate upon the gratitude of all sires similarly beset, if the telling of it here, and by them to their respective young ladies, should be followed by the desired consequences,—which I do not at all anticipate.
A certain knight having lost his wife, and not being at all sure as to the locality in which her spirit rested, applied to a devout hermit, who picked up a living by revealing that sort of secret. In our own days, the Rev. Mr. Godfrey professes to get at the same mystery by dint of table-turning. Well; the reverend gentleman’s ancestor, the hermit, thought upon the question by going to sleep over it; and when he awoke, he informed the knight that he had been, in a vision, to the tribunal of souls, and that he had there learned all about the lady in question. He had seen St. Michael and Lucifer standing opposite each other, and between them a pair of scales, in one of which was placed the lady’s soul, with its select assortment of good deeds; and in the other, all her evil actions. A fiend, with all her garments and jewellery in his possession, was looking on. The beam of the balance had not yet made a movement, when the impetuous St. Michael was about generously to claim the soul thus weighed. Thereupon Lucifer urbanely remarked, that he would take the liberty of informing his once-esteemed friend of a fact probably unknown to him. “This woman,” said he, “had no less than ten gowns and as many coats; and you know as well as I do, my good Michael, that half the quantity would have sufficed for her requirements, and would not have been contrary to the law of God.”
St. Michael looked rather offended at its being supposed that he knew anything about women and their gear, and suggested that too much intercourse with both had been the ruin of his ex-colleague.
“Fier comme un Archange!” was the commentary of the deboshed Lucifer, who, according to some old fathers, tempted Eve in very excellent French. However that may be, he added, “the value of one of this pretty wanton’s superfluous gowns or coats would have clothed and kept forty poor men through a whole winter: and the mere waste cloth from them would have saved two or three from perishing. Touche-fille,” he said, addressing the fiend who carried the finery, “throw those traps into the scale.” The fiend obeyed, by casting them in where the lady’s bad actions lay; and straightway down sank that scale, and upward flew the beam which bore the soul and its ounce of virtues. This was done with such a jerk that the soul itself fell into the outspread arms of Touche-fille, who made off with his prey, without waiting for further award. Lucifer looked inquiringly at St. Michael; but the latter observed, that though his opponent’s aide-de-camp had been somewhat too hasty, he would not dispute the case any further. “But what, may I ask, do you intend to do with her?”
“She shall have a new dress daily, and fancy herself ugly in all.”
“Umph!” said Michael, “you certainly are the most exquisite of torturers.”
“And Michael, despite his modesty, does know what most vexes a woman!”
“Go to ⸺;” whither, the last person addressed had not time to say. He was interrupted by Lucifer, who remarked:—
“I have business upon earth. My affairs at home are well cared for in my absence by a regency.”
And so they parted; and the moral of the tale is, that luxury in dress tends to lead to the Devil. And though it be lightly said, it is also truly said. Let us look through the book of patterns, wherein we may trace the varieties of costume, its fashion and its follies, and see how what was irreproachable today becomes ridiculous tomorrow.
ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD.
PART I.
“L’habit est une partie intégrante de l’homme; il agit sur nos sens, et détermine notre jugement.”—La Bruyere.
Our ancestors, in early days, had what may be called early ways. They were in no respect superior to New Zealanders in a savage state. Civilization has however copied some of their customs, and old ladies who paint their cheeks and necks are not much further advanced than their ancestors, who coloured themselves all over, and that not out of vanity.
Strabo says that the people in the west of England shaved their chins, but cherished mustachios, wore black garments, and carried a stick. This description might serve for half the gentlemen who are to be seen in Regent Street and Rotten Row during the “season.” But I suppose one may take the liberty to doubt that the Cradocks of today really resemble so closely as the description would seem to warrant, their progenitors the Caradocs of other times, who “looked like furies,” says Strabo, “but were in fact quiet and inoffensive people.”
The early Welsh bards, we are told, dressed in sky-blue; the modern bards of the million are content to breakfast on it: the British astronomers wore green, which was not indicative of what the colour might have stood for,—a verdant knowledge of the science. When the Romans planted their conquering eagles on our soil, the old British chieftains resisted them and their fashions. Tacitus says that it was the sons of the chieftains who first adopted the Roman mode; and no doubt the old gentlemen were disgusted when they beheld their unpatriotic young heirs wandering about without their braccæ, and sporting the tunic before whose presence liberty and trousers had disappeared, but not for ever.
The Saxons brought in their own fashions, and some of these still prevail; the smock-frock, for instance, is the old Saxon tunic without the belt. Such a dress was never known in Ireland nor in Scotland: the Saxons kept for whole centuries to a fixed fashion, as may be seen in any illustrated work on costume. In this respect they were only less tenacious than the Persians, whose garments passed from father to son as long as they could hold together. It would be difficult, I fancy, to persuade any modern young Anglo-Saxon to draw on the scanc-beorg, or shank-coverers, of his respected and deceased “governor.” It is only the mantles of our Peers that descend hereditarily upon the shoulders of succeeding generations; and some of these mantles look dingy enough to date their origin from the time when Henry III. established Tothill-fields Fair, in order to spite the Londoners. The latter, it will be remembered, were compelled to close their shops for an entire fortnight during the holding of the fair in Westminster; and the man on Tower Hill who wanted to furnish his outward or inward person with the smallest article was compelled to resort for it to the neighbourhood of the Abbey, or to do without till the fair was raised.
The taste of the Anglo-Saxons was rather of a splendid character, but sometimes questionable. A lady with blue hair, for instance, could not have been half so pleasant to look at as a lady with blue eyes; though the custom of dyeing the hair blue was perhaps scarcely more objectionable than that of the young ladies and gentlemen of Gaul, who washed theirs in a chalky solution, in order to make it a more fiery red than it had been rendered by nature. I may add that, of the tasteful Anglo-Saxons, the nuns were the most especially tasteful; and the gorgeous attire of the sisters, with other attractions, seems to have stirred the very hearts of some of the most stony of prelates.
Many of the latter however were rigidly severe in their censures against the luxurious dressing of lively Saxon nuns; but their objurgations take very much the form of that delivered by Tartuffe when he handed his kerchief to Dorine:—
“Couvrez ce sein que je ne sçaurais voir:
A de tels objets les yeux sont blessés,
Et cela fait venir de coupables pensées.”
Though it be necessary to consider climate and temperature in the matter of dress, we have had weather, even in England, from the severity of which no dress could protect the wearer. Thus, in the year 851, the winter became so suddenly cold and inclement, and went on with such increasing severity, that clothing afforded no warmth to the frame, and the people were widely smitten by paralysis. They suffered excruciating anguish in the limbs; generally the arms and hands were first seized upon by the disease, and those limbs usually became altogether withered and useless. The paralysis respected neither rank, age, nor sex; the highest dignitaries of the Church did not escape, though, of course, they miraculously recovered. The clothiers of the period appear to have been as much puzzled to discover a material for useful wear that would meet the contingency, as a modern tailor would find it difficult to take measure of the pulpy, shapeless, boneless being which Professor Whewell, in his ‘Plurality of Worlds,’ thinks may be existing in Jupiter. And he has a right to think so; for, on our own earth, have we not had animals whose bones were on the outside, and whose inward parts were all of cartilage? They would have been pretty playthings for Jupiter’s emphatically soft nymphs and unvertebrated swains!
If the nuns of the Anglo-Saxon times were given to gorgeousness, the clergy were not at all uninclined to dandyism. Boniface himself denounced those priests who wore broad studs and images of worms, as servants of Antichrist. Garments so adorned are looked upon by the descendants of this great Anglo-Saxon missionary as the undoubtedly original “M. B. coats.”
The Danes introduced fashions that sadly perplexed the simple tailors of all Anglia. The former, in the days of their paganism, were attired in garments as black as the raven which soared on their national standard. When they came to England they learned to surpass the Anglo-Saxons themselves in the gaiety of their apparel and manners. They even took to combing their hair once a day; became so effeminate as to wash weekly; and changed their body-linen, if not as often as they might, still more frequently than was their wont of old. “By these means,” says old Wallingford, “they pleased the eyes of the women, and frequently seduced the wives and daughters of the nobility.” Alas, that virtue should not be proof against even a half-washed seducer!
One of the greatest of the North Sea chieftains derived his name from his dress, and Ragner Lodbroch means Ralph Leatherbreeches. The Lethbridges of Somersetshire are said to be descendants from this worthy. They might go further in search of an ancestor and fare worse. Lodbroch delighted in blood and plunder; wine he drank by the quart; wealth he acquired by “right of might;” he believed in little, and feared even less. A family anxious to assert its nobility could hardly do better than hold fast by such a hero. Many a genealogical tree springs from a less illustrious root.
The submission with which England received laws of fashion from France is seen in the circumstance that even before the Conquest the English imported the “mode” from beyond Channel, and universally adopted it. This was the case both in speech and dress. The Saxon tongue became as mute at the court of Edward the Confessor as the Flemish language has around the throne of Leopold of Belgium. The respectable sires however of the period did not make themselves so “outlandish” in their garb as did their sons; yet when William tumbled on the sands at Pevensey, half the hostile array prepared to resist his coming, as well as those who looked on and awaited the course of events, were familiar with his form of speech and accustomed to his fashion of dress. The fact that when William was agitated he invariably occupied himself in lacing and untying his cloak, is at least as well worth knowing as that the great Coligny under similar circumstances used to insert two or three toothpicks into his mouth, and there champ them into pulp. Let us add, that the Normans shaved close and washed thoroughly; and the dirty Saxons might have found consolation in the circumstance that their throats were cut by cleanly gentlemen.
They were a costly people however, those Normans; and they not only ruined the Saxons, but themselves, by the extravagance of their dress, and the ever-varying fashions to which they bore an alacrity of allegiance. Some of our wealthiest men of Norman descent, or fancying themselves to be so, adopt in these days a fashion common enough in the period of the Norman Kings, wearing a plumed helm on parade for show, and a “wide-awake” elsewhere for comfort. The Normans even took the venerated smock-frock of the Saxons, and modifying it a little, and lining it with fur for the winter, they wore it as a surcoat over their armour, and called it by the name of bliaus. Any gentleman therefore who wears a blouse and a wide-awake may fancy himself, if he please, as being attired like a Norman knight. Well, in spite of the strength of his fancy and the sameness of the articles in question, he will be as little like to Norman cavalier “as I to Hercules.”
I have said that the Normans generally were remarkable for the splendour and variety of their costume; I may add that some of the Saxons were in no degree behind them. There is Becket, for instance, the champion of the Saxons and advocate of the Commons. When that remarkably humble man went on his famous progress to Paris, the rustics observed, as he rode meekly along, that the king of England must be a marvellous personage indeed, seeing that his Lord Chancellor looked more like a king on his throne than a traveller in the saddle. He was as stately in dress at home as abroad; and he never forgave King Henry for tearing from his shoulders his splendid new scarlet mantle lined with fur, to fling it to a shivering beggar at his side. Excellent practical lesson, it may be observed. Well, it assuredly was all the practical charity ever evinced by the king. And moreover it was inappropriate. We all laughed when the angelic Irving subscribed his gold watch to some benevolent fund; and we should feel no particular increase of respect for our Sovereign and the Lord Primate if they were to stand at Temple Bar, and the former were to distribute the wardrobe of the latter among the mendicants who pass beneath that hideously ridiculous arch.
Foppery in dress was at its height in the reign of Henry III., when men half-ruined themselves in order that they might dress in vestments of the magnificent material called cloth of Baldekins, or of Baldeck, the usually received term for Babylon. The rich Cyclas of this time were also named from the locality where the material was manufactured,—a custom common enough, as may be seen in the names Worsted, Blanket, Cambric, Diaper (d’Yprès), Bayonet, and many others. The general love of dress, and the wealth manifested by the grandeur of the latter, made Innocent IV. to speak of England as a “garden of delights,” and a “truly inexhaustible fountain of riches.” From this fountain his Holiness drank many a draught; and they who were compelled to supply it wished it might choke him. But Innocent made cheap compensation to England by conferring on it the signal honour of adopting its old national “wide-awake,” and after dyeing it red, conferring it on his Cardinals. The scarlet wide-awake was first worn at the Council of Lyons, in 1245. The Cardinals did not exhibit their accustomed vigilance when they permitted the fashion of this covering to glide from that of the wide-awake into that of the “broad-brim” of the Society of Friends. But perhaps it is because of its present fashion that Mr. Bright, who loves Russia and hates the press, has such respect for Rome and such welcome for her aggressions.
“Why do you not wear richer apparel?” once asked a familiar friend of Edward I. “Because,” said the sensible king, “I cannot be more estimable in fine than I am in simple clothing.” If the monarch had only shown as much sense in other matters, he would have been a more profitable king to the state, however little beneficial he may have been to tailors. It was, of course, the fashion now to be rather simply dressed; but there were occasional departures from the rule: such as when the young Prince Edward was invested as a knight, on which occasion the Temple Gardens were crowded with the young nobility, his “companions,” who assembled there to receive a magnificent distribution of purple robes, fine linen garments, and mantles woven with gold. The two latter were furnished by the merchant-tailors; and these, no doubt, blessed the donor as heartily as the trade would now do, were her Majesty to assemble the heirs and younger sons of Peers, have them measured in public, and dressed at her expense for the benefit of trade. There are many younger sons who would be as rejoiced thereat as the tailors themselves.
Old Kit Marlowe, and doubtless from good authority, has graphically described not only Edward the Second, but that fine gentleman, his favourite Gaveston. Of the latter he says:—
“I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk;
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.”
And of Edward, Mortimer is made to say:—
“When wert thou in the field with banner spread?
But once; and then thy soldiers march’d like players,
With garish robes, not armour; and thyself,
Bedaub’d with gold, rode laughing at the rest,
Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest,
Where women’s favours hung like labels down.”
If the Norman Kings up to the period of Edward I. had encouraged a costly extravagance of dress, there was another Norman habit which had spread among the people generally, and quite as much to their cost,—the wretched habit of swearing. To that people might well be applied the assertion, that they were covered with curses as with a garment. The Saxons were astounded at the variety and intensity of these oaths. They had not been accustomed to such profanity; but as the conquerors, and particularly the kings, swore whenever they spoke, why to use oaths was to put on the air of a conqueror and gentleman, and so a species of Norman pride kept oaths in vigour among the élite of society until a very recent period; but, as Mr. Robert Acres remarks, “the best terms will grow obsolete, and Damns have had their day.” How we progressed through execratory terms until this consummation was arrived at, is very tersely told in an old epigram of Sir John Harrington’s:—
“In elder times an ancient custom was
To swear, in weighty matters, by the mass;
But when the mass went down, as old men note,
They swore then by the cross of this same groat.
And when the cross was likewise held in scorn,
Then by their faith the common oath was sworn;
Last, having sworn away all faith and troth,
Only ‘G—d damn them’ is their common oath.
Thus custom kept decorum by gradation,
That losing mass, cross, faith, they find damnation.”
Henry I. was surrounded by a crowd of friends, whose dresses were splendid and whose principles were detestable,—not to say “devilish.” These were the “Effeminati.” They were like the “mignons” of the French King Henri, and acquired their appellation from the fact of dressing nearly after the fashion of women. Their tunics were deep-sleeved, and their mantles long-trained. The peaks of their shoes were not only enormously long, but twisted so as to represent the horns of a ram or the coils of a serpent. Their peaks, introduced by Fulk, Earl of Anjou, to conceal his misshapen feet, were stuffed with tow; and certainly, were any earl or other gentleman now to enter a drawing-room thus remarkably shod, he would himself be taken in tow (if I may be so bold as to say so), and conveyed before a tribunal de lunatico inquirendo. The Effeminati, like the French “mignons,” wore their hair long, smooth, and parted in the middle; and they were not only unpleasantly unnatural to look at, but were horribly so in their deeds.
The foreign knights and visitors who came to Windsor in Edward the First’s reign, and brought with them a continual succession of varying fashions, turned the heads of the young with delight, and of the old with disgust. Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, is especially denunciative and satirical on this point. He says that in the horrible variety of costume,—“now long, now large, now wide, now straight,”—the style of dress was “destitute and devert from all honesty of old arraye or good usage.” It is all, he says, “so nagged and knibbed on every side, and all so shattered and also buttoned, that I with truth shall say, they seem more like to tormentors or devils in their clothing, and also in their shoying and other array, than they seemed to be like men.” And the old monk had good foundation for his complaint; and the Commons themselves having, what the Commons now have not, a dread of becoming as extravagant as their betters in the article of dress, actually sought the aid of Parliament. That august assembly met the complaint by restricting the use of furs and furls to the royal family and nobles worth one thousand per annum. Knights and ladies worth four hundred marks yearly, were permitted to deck themselves in cloths of gold and silver, and to wear certain jewellery. Poor knights, squires, and damsels were prohibited from appearing in the costume of those of higher degree. As for the Commons themselves, they could put on nothing better than unadorned woollen cloth; and if an apprentice or a milliner had been bold enough to wear a ring on the finger, it was in peril of a decree that it should be taken off,—not the finger, but the ring,—with confiscation of the forbidden finery.
The consequence was that the Commons, being under prohibition to put on finery, became smitten with a strong desire to assume it; and much did they rejoice when they were ruled over by so consummate a fop as Richard of Bordeaux. All classes were content to do what many classes joyfully do in our own days,—dress beyond their means; and we find in old Harding’s ‘Chronicle’ that not only were
“Yemen and gromes in cloth of silk arrayed,
Sattin and damask, in doublettes and in gownnes,”
but that all this, as well as habits of “cloth of greene and scarleteen,—cut work and brodwar, was all,” as the Chronicler expresses it, “for unpayed;” that is, was not paid for. So that very many among us do not so much despise the wisdom afforded us by the example of our ancestors as didactic poets and commonplace honest writers falsely allege them to do. And those ancestors of Richard the Second’s time were especially given to glorify themselves in parti-coloured garments of white and red, such being the colours of the King’s livery (as blue and white were those of John of Gaunt); and they who wore these garments, sometimes of half-a-dozen colours in each, why they looked, says an old writer, “as though the fire of St. Anthony, or some such mischance,” had cankered and eaten into half their bodies. The long-toed shoes, held up to the knee by a chain and hook, were called crackowes, the fashion thereof coming from Cracow in Poland. The not less significant name of “devil’s receptacles” were given to the wide sleeves of this reign, for the reason, as the Monk of Evesham tells us, that whatever was stolen was thrust into them.
The fashion of clothes has long ceased to mark the position of the wearer. On this subject, Fuller says in his ‘Church History,’ when treating of the time of Edward III., that “some had a project that men’s clothes might be their signs to show their birth, degree, or estate, so that the quality of an unknown person might, at the first sight, be expounded by his apparel. But this was at once let fall as impossible: statesmen in all ages, notwithstanding their several laws to the contrary, being fain to connive at men’s riot in this kind, which maintaineth more poor people than their charity.”
Distinction in dress, it will be remembered, was not allowed by More in his Utopia. “All the island over,” he says, “they make their own clothes, without any other distinction than that which is necessary for marking the difference between the two sexes, and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters; and as it is not ungrateful nor uneasy, so it is fitted for their climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned.” A costume suitable for all conditions of the seasons, were a consummation that will long be among the things to be devoutly wished for, and never attained.
It was once the fashion to wear coats, the material for which had not long before been on the back of the sheep. For rapidity of work in this way, I know nothing that can compete with the achievement of Coxeter of Greenham Mills, near Newbury. He had a couple of South Down sheep shorn at his factory, at five o’clock in the morning; the wool thus produced was put through the usual processes; and by a quarter past six in the evening, it resulted in a complete damson-coloured coat, which was worn at an evening party, by Sir John Throckmorton. A wager for a thousand guineas was won by this feat, with three-quarters of an hour to spare. The sheep were roasted whole, and devoured at a splendid banquet. In one day they afforded comfort to both the inner and outward man.
We have often been told, that “Beauty, when unadorned, is adorned the most;” and there is much truth in that wholesome apothegm. Beauty indeed needs to be dressed; but Prudence should be her handmaiden. In illustration of the excellence of this counsel, I may quote what happened to two young ladies and one lover in the days of chivalry.
In those days there lived an old noble, rich in two daughters, and in nought besides. Of these, he promised one to a young knight, who was wealthy and idle, and who—strange characteristic of young and gallant knight!—was well content to be saved the trouble of wooing.
On a certain fine morning the sire made the same announcement to his girls which the father of Dinah made to that now celebrated and unhappy young lady,—namely, the necessity of decking themselves in their most seductive array, as there was a lover on the road who would dine with them that day. Now, if the morning was fine, there was also an eager and a nipping air abroad; but the elder of the two damsels, disregarding the temperature, and thinking only how best to display her slender waist and graceful shape, put on a “cote hardie;” and in this close-fitting garment, without an inch of fur to lend it warmth, she accompanied her sister to the portal, to bid welcome to the lover, looking for a lady of his love. But that sister was attired with reference to the condition of the thermometer, if her father had one, which is exceedingly doubtful. She was warmly clad; and if her figure was concealed by her mantle, the result of such covering was, that her young blood, in circulating, left a rose upon her cheeks, and did not fix itself, in obstinate stagnation, as in her more airy sister’s case, on the tip of the nose.
Now a red nose is not fascinating; and the knight’s choice was soon made. He gave his hand to the maiden who had shown most sense in the choice of attire, and a very merry wedding was the speedy consequence. As for what turned up in the way of further results, it was, I believe, chiefly the nose of the unsuccessful candidate, which became “retroussé en permanence”. The moral of the tale is respectfully recommended to the notice of all young ladies who seek to catch ardent knights on wintry mornings.
If the men in the days of Edward III. wore “tails behind,” as well as beards before, the ladies were not behind them in extravagance—in tails; and indeed in other matters. For a lady to ride on a palfrey, and not on a charger, would have been considered as derogatory as for a bridesmaid, in our days, to “spoil her prospects” by going to a wedding in a one-horse fly. The damsels of this age very much affected the dress of the men, and we have seen the same affectation in our own time; and this fashion was pushed to such an extreme, that they even carried two tiny daggers in the pouches of their embroidered zones. Their head-dress still lingers among the female peasantry of Normandy, and may be recognized in the species of mitre cap, of enormous height, from the summit of which streamers float in the air like pennants from the masts of some “tall amiral.” It may be added, that if, in many respects, the dresses of the women resembled those of the men, their deeds, too, were like theirs; and these were often (like the dresses) none of the cleanest.
We will discuss the progress of these matters in a new chapter.
ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD.
PART II.
“La modestie, la plus touchante des vertus, est encore la plus séduisante des parures.”—Mad. Cottin: Mathilde.
The Jews were undoubtedly an ill-fated people. In London, in the olden time, whenever any class had a grievance, the work of redress was commenced by slaying the Hebrews. In the reign of Henry III. the municipality of London and a portion of the nobility were dreadfully incensed against Queen Eleanor; and to show their indignation, they not only plundered and murdered scores of common Israelites, but the City Marshal and Baron Fitz-John repaired to the residence of Kok ben Abraham, the wealthiest Hebrew in the city, where the noble lord ran his sword through the body of the child of the synagogue, laughing the while as if the jest were a good one. Certainly, this was a strange method of showing a political bias; and it would be no jest now if Lord Winchelsea, for instance, angry at the desire of the Crown to admit Jews into Parliament, were to rush down to the city and plunge his paper-cutter into the diaphragm of poor Baron Rothschild.
In the case above alluded to, not only were some four hundred of the devoted race robbed and killed, but the mob, satiated with savagery, determined to wind up their well-spent evening with a frolic. Accordingly they turned out of their beds all the Jews, of various ages and both sexes, and compelled them to walk the streets throughout the entire night, with nothing on but their “bed-gowns.” This was scant dress enough in those times, and there was no active police to afford the victims protection. I notice this incident, because it comes fairly under the head of costume. I think, moreover, that all the police in the city at the present time would be puzzled what to do, were the last night of an election, returning “Sir Solomon” at the head of the poll, to be signalled out by a riot, the climax of which presented all the Levys, Goldschmidts, Isaacs, and Marx, of “Simmery Axe,”—wives and husbands, sons and daughters,—compulsorily parading through Cheapside in their night-gear. Between the blushes of Miss Tryphena Levy, and the indignation of Mr. Penuel Isaacs her admirer, the gallant and loud-laughing Division X. would hardly know which victim to succour first. Such a cortège however would probably bring into fashion the “bonnets de nuit à la Juive.”
Our gallant knights of old thought it no degradation to receive clothes at the hands of the king. When Henry IV. dubbed some four dozen the day before his coronation, he made presents to all of long green coats, with tight sleeves, furred, and verdant hoods: the cavaliers must have looked like cucumbers. The sumptuary laws of this reign had this additional severity in them, that they decreed imprisonment during the King’s pleasure against any tailor who should dare to make for a commoner a costume above his degree. The tailors, like wise men, did not ask their customers whether they were gentle or simple; and burghers dressed as before, more splendidly than barons.
There was this difference between the two wretched monarchs, John and Richard III. John was curious about his wife’s dress, and careless touching his own; whereas Richard (who was not half so bad as history and Mr. C. Kean represent him) was perhaps the most superbly royal dandy that ever sat on an English throne: George IV. was the mere Dandini to that Prince Ramiro. Henry VII., again, was utterly void of taste, and seems to have wanted a nurse more than a valet.
The author of the ‘Boke of Kervynge’ says to the “proper officer” of this king, in a sort of advice to servants, “Warme your soveregne his petticotte, his doublet, and his stomacher, and then put on hys hozen, and then hys schose or slyppers; then stryten up hys hozen mannerly, tye them up, and lace his doublet hole by hole.”
We have an illustration of the national feeling with regard to dress in Henry VIII.’s time, in the story of Drake, the cordwainer.
John Drake, the Norwich shoemaker, was resolved to dress, for once, like a knight; and accordingly he betook himself to Sir Philip Calthrop’s tailor, and seeing some fine French tawney cloth lying there, which the cavalier had sent to have made into a gown,—gentlemen then, as now, it seems, sometimes found “their own materials,”—the aspiring Crispin ordered a gown of the same stuff and fashion. The knight, on calling at the tailor’s, saw the two parcels of “materials,” and inquired as to the proprietary of the second. “The stuff,” said the master, “is John Drake’s, the Norwich shoemaker, who will have a gown of the same fashion as your valiant worship.” “Will he so?” asked proud Sir Philip; “then fashion mine as full of cuts as thy shears can make it, and let the two be alike, as ordered.” He was obeyed; but when John Drake looked wonderingly upon his aristocratic garment, and saw the peculiar mode thereof, and was moreover told the reason therefor, he rubbed his bullet-head vexedly, and remarked, “By my latchet, an it be so John Drake will never ask for gentleman’s fashion again.”
I have spoken in my ‘Table Traits’ of how a French knight gained a livelihood by making salads; I may notice here that a Flemish frau, Dingham van der Plafze, did the same by starching ruffs in London, in Queen Elizabeth’s time. She gave lessons to the nobility at four or five pounds the course for each pupil, and an additional pound for showing them how to make the starch. The nobility of course patronized her; being a foreigner, the duchesses accounted her “divine.” People of the commonalty, with as much wisdom, esteemed her as a devil; and starch itself was looked upon as a sort of devil’s broth. The women who wore ruffs were looked upon as anything but respectable; and the men who placed around the neck the “monstrous ruff, of twelve, yea sixteen, lengths apiece, set three or four times double,” were accounted of as having made “three steps and a half to the gallows.”
James I., and his subjects who wished to clothe themselves loyally, wore stupendous breeches. Of course the “honourable gentlemen” of the House of Commons were necessarily followers of the fashion. But it led to inconveniences in the course of their senatorial duties. It was an old mode revived; and at an earlier day, when these nether garments were ample enough to have covered the lower man of Boanerges, the comfort of the popular representatives was thus cared for:—“Over the seats in the parliament-house, there were certain holes, some two inches square, in the walls, in which were placed posts to uphold a scaffold round about the house within, for them to sit upon who used the wearing of great breeches stuffed with hair like wool-sacks, which fashion being left the eighth year of Elizabeth, the scaffolds were taken down, and never since put up.” So says Strutt; but doubtless the comforts of the members were not less cared for when the old fashion again prevailed. The honourable gentlemen must have looked as if they were worshipping Cloacina rather than propitiating the god of Eloquence.
“When Sir Peter Wych,” says Bulwer, in his ‘Pedigree of an English Gallant,’ “was sent ambassador to the Grand Seigneur, from James I., his lady accompanied him to Constantinople, and the Sultaness having heard much of her, desired to see her; whereupon Lady Wych, attended by her waiting-women, all of them dressed in their great vardingales, which was the court dress of the English ladies of that time, waited upon her highness. The Sultaness received her visitors with great respect; but, struck with the extraordinary extension of the hips of the whole party, seriously inquired if that shape was peculiar to the natural formation of Englishwomen; and Lady Wych was obliged to explain the whole mystery of the dress, in order to convince her that she and her companions were not really so deformed as they appeared to be.” Lady Wych probably did not look more astounding to the Turks than the Marchioness of Londonderry did to those of some thirty years ago, when she traversed the courts of the Sultan’s palace in the full undress of a lady of the “Regent’s Drawing Room.” Both these ladies were ambassadresses, and they remind me of the English nobleman in the reign of Anne, who was informed that he had been appointed representative of his sovereign at the court of the Sultan. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “I can never undertake it, I should look so absurd and awkward in women’s clothes!” He seriously thought that to represent his mistress he must be dressed as she was! But I shall say more of Anne hereafter. I have here to exhibit Oliver; Charles, as we all know, was a gentleman, at all events in dress. In that respect Cromwell differed from him.
“The first time that I ever took notice of Oliver Cromwell,” says Sir Philip Warwick, “was in the beginning of the Parliament held in November, 1640, when I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman, for we courtiers valued ourselves much upon our good clothes. I came one morning into the house well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His linen was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar. His hat was without a hatband; his stature was of good size; his sword stuck close to his side.” Altogether it is clear that Oliver was a trifle slovenly, and sometimes unsteady enough of hand to cut himself when shaving.
About the year 1660-1, we find our old friend Mr. Pepys gradually soaring in the sky of fashion. He had been content with camlet, then he gets him a suit of cloth with broad skirts, and adds the unheard-of atrocity of rakish buckles to his shoes. Subsequently he enshrines his little person in silk; ultimately rises to the dignity of a velvet coat; and on a “Lord’s Day,” in February, he writes down that “this day I first began to go forth in my coate and sword, as the manner now among gentlemen is.” “Among gentlemen!” quotha; and his sire the tailor was yet alive, and his cousin Tom Pepys was an honest turner, and sold mousetraps!
A velvet coat was not for every-day wear by a clerk in the Admiralty, and Pepys had his by him a full half-year before he had the heart to surprise the world and gratify himself by the wearing of it. Nor could Peers walk every day in velvet and embroidery in Coleman-street, seeing that the cost of a suit was not under £200. They were content to go occasionally like the King at the Council Board—in a plain common riding-suit and a velvet cap;—not half so fine as the livery of Pepys’s own boy, “which is very handsome, and I do think to keep the black and gold lace upon grey, being the colour of my arms, for ever.” The “colour of his arms!” This reminds me of the rejoinder of Russell, the porter at the old Piazza, who, on being asked if his coat-of-arms was the same as that of the Duke of Bedford, replied that as for their arms they might be pretty well alike, but that there was a deal of difference between their coats!
Pepys was however as proud as a popinjay, as the manner then among gentlemen was; and his man Will imitated his master. Tel maître, tel valet. See what he says of an occurrence which he notices on “Lord’s Day,” June 8, 1662. “Home, and observe my man Will to walk with his cloak flung over his shoulder, which, whether it was that he might not be seen to walk along with the footboy, I knew not, but I was vexed at it; and coming home, and after prayers, I did ask him where he learned that immodest garb; and he answered me that it was not immodest, or some such slight answer, at which I did give him two boxes on the eares, which I never did before.” But the transgressor forgot his fault, in his gratification a few Sundays after in going to church with his wife,—“who this day put on her green petticoate of flowred sattin, with the white and black gimp lace of her own putting on, which is very pretty.” I fear that our ancestors thought as much upon matters of dress at church as any of their descendants. To what an extent this feeling was carried may be seen in the case of Pepys, who, seeing Captain Holmes in his pew in a new gold-laced suit, was so chagrined that a disquisition upon damnation failed to put him into spirits. The feelings of both husband and wife were very sensitive touching costume; for does he not tell us, on one occasion, that on a certain visit being paid them, they “were ashamed that she should be seen in a taffeta gown when all the world wears moyre”?
The gentleman’s eyes indeed had just been regaled by a sight of the “Russian Embassador,”—“in the richest suit for pearl and tissue that ever I did see.” The envoy appears to have been an exceedingly well-dressed barbarian; and the Muscovite officials of our own day are in no respect behind him. Felony and mendacity would seem to be accounted of as péchés mignons by those gentlemen who wear polished boots and profess honest principles, with coats like Count d’Orsay’s, and hearts beneath them like Jack Sheppard’s. After all, the pearl and tissue of the Russ was not half so tasteful as Lord Sandwich’s “gold-buttoned suit, as the mode is;” and Pepys took to the fashion, buying fine clothes, and half afraid to wear them, yet rejoicing that he is not now “for want of them, forced to sneak like a beggar.” A camlet suit for common wear then cost him four-and-twenty pounds! But Pepys had fits of extravagance as well as economy. The former however were generally born of patriotism: witness his buying “a coloured silk ferrandin suit, for joy of the good news we have lately had of our victory over the Dutch.”
About the time above specified, the Court of Spain was remarkable for its gravity of dress. The king and grandees wore simple mantles of Colchester baize; and in winter, the mantles of the señoras were of no more costly material than white flannel. Thereupon English and Dutch handicraftsmen repaired to Madrid, in order to establish a manufactory of these articles. The men engaged were sober, religious men; and they had with them Psalters and Testaments, and they were given to be glad in spiritual songs, and to solace their weariness with a refreshing draught from the Gospels. Thereupon the Inquisition fell upon them, destroyed their houses, and imprisoned the workmen. Had these been Atheists, the “Holy Office” would not have molested them in their manufactory of baizes and flannels; but as they dared to worship God in sincerity of heart and independence of mind, the Cahills and Wisemans of the pure and enlightened Peninsula ruined them in bodily estate, and sent their souls to Gehenna.
Louis XIV. was quite as arbitrary and absurd on a matter of fashion. Charles II. of England was the inventor of the “vest dress.” It consisted of a long cassock which fitted close to the body, of black cloth, “pinked” with white silk under it, and a coat over all; the legs were ruffled with black ribbon, like a pigeon’s leg; and the white silk piercing the black made the wearers look, as Charles himself confessed, very much like magpies. But all the world put it on, because it had been fashioned by a monarch; and gay men thought it exquisite, and grave men pronounced it “comely and manly.” Charles declared he would never alter it, while his courtiers “gave him gold by way of wagers, that he would not persist in his resolution.” Louis XIV. showed his contempt for the new mode and the maker of it, by ordering all his footmen to be put into vests. This caused great indignation in England, but it had a marked effect in another way: for Charles and our aristocracy, not caring to look like French footmen, soon abandoned the new costume.
This reminds me of a foolish interference of Louis XVI. in a matter of dress. In the days of our grandfathers there was nothing so fashionable for summer wear as nankeen. No gentleman would be seen abroad or at home in a dress of which this material did not go to the making of a portion; and as we ever fixed the fashion on questions of male costume, the mode was adopted in France, and English nankeens threatened to drive all French manufactured articles of summer wear out of the market. The king however surmounted the difficulty: he ordered all the executioners and their assistants to perform their terrible office in no other dress but one of nankeen. This rendered the material “infamous;” and many a man who deserved to be hanged, discarded the suit because a similar one was worn by the man who did the hanging. So Mrs. Turner, the poisoner, being executed in the reign of James I. in a yellow starched ruff, put to death the fashion of wearing them.
Picturesqueness of costume went out with chivalry; and few things could be uglier than an Englishman of James the Second’s or of William and Mary’s days, except an Englishman of our own tight and buttoned period.
A hundred years ago it would have been unsafe to have sold a plaid waistcoat in either Rag Fair or Houndsditch. In 1752 Mr. Thornton said in the House of Commons, that “he believed it true, plaid waistcoats had been worn by some wrong heads in the country; but in the parts where he lived he saw no occasion for an army to correct them” (he was speaking against a standing army), “for some that had attempted to wear them had been heartily thrashed for doing so.” In the same year it is worthy of remark that we were exporting gold and silver bullion to the Continent; not indeed at the rate at which we are now importing it, especially the former, but still in quantities that seem almost incredible. The metal-import question as it stood then excites a smile in those who read it now. For example, among the current news given by our juvenile friend, Sylvanus Urban, in his volume for 1752, we learn that “a parcel of waistcoats embroidered with foreign gold and silver (which were lately seized at a tailor’s house, who must pay the penalty of £100, pursuant to Act of Parliament), were publicly burnt in presence of the custom-house officers and others.”
The steeple head-dresses of Anne and the first George’s days came under the notice of Addison, in the ‘Spectator.’ He compares them with the commodes, or towers, of his time. Speaking of the former, he tells us that the women would have carried their head-structures much higher had it not been for the preaching of a monk named Concete. The good and zealous man preached with more effect than Rowland Hill did, when he inveighed from the pulpit against Mrs. Hill’s top-knots. So logically did he prove that steeple head-dresses were devices of the devil, that they who wore them were the devil’s daughters, and that after this life the everlasting home of the latter would be with their father, that the ladies, in a fit of religious enthusiasm, cast off the denounced decorations during the summer, and made a bonfire of them after it was over. It must have been a pretty fire in which pride was burned, for the congregation amounted to something like ten thousand women, with as many male hearers; from which it is to be supposed that the preaching took place in the open air. If only half the ladies committed their caps to the flames, it was, no doubt, a glad sight to the makers of the caps. They were sure that if fashion went out in one blaze, it would rise phœnix-like from the flames of that fire or another. For a time however, these exaggerated head-dresses were excommunicated; and it was as unsafe for a lady to appear in one in public, as it would be for a lady to make a tour through the liberty of Dublin on the 12th of July, clad entirely in materials of Orange hue, and singing at the top of her voice the exasperating song of ‘Boyne Water.’ She would assuredly be pelted, as they were pelted by the religious and unfashionable rabble, who, years ago, if they could tolerate sin, were shocked at the sight of tall gay caps, which had been denounced by a short grave friar. But the milliners had not long to wait unemployed. As soon as the monk had turned his back, the needlewomen were again set to work; and “countless ’prentices expired” in the efforts made to execute the orders. “The women,” says Monsieur Paradin, “who had, like snails in a fright, drawn in their horns, shot them out again as soon as the danger was over.”
When Walpole had been to King George the Second’s Levee and Drawing-room, in 1742, he wrote of what he witnessed in this lively fashion:—“There were so many new faces that I scarce knew where I was; I should have taken it for Carleton House, or my Lady Mayoress’s visiting day, only the people did not seem enough at home, but rather as admitted to see the King dine in public. ’Tis quite ridiculous to see the numbers of old ladies, who, from having been wives of patriots, have not been dressed these twenty years; out they come, in all the accoutrements that were in use in Queen Anne’s days. Then the joy and awkward jollity of them is inexpressible. They titter, and wherever you meet them, they are always going to court, and looking at their watches an hour before the time. I met several on the birthday (for I did not arrive time enough to make clothes), and they were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow: they seem to have said to themselves twenty years ago, ‘Well, if ever I do go to court again, I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver;’ and they keep their resolution.”
Walpole is quite right in designating the gaiety of the women as an awkward jollity. Rough enjoyment was a fashion at this time with the fair. Mrs. Sherwood, in her pleasant Autobiography, adverts to this subject in speaking of her mother’s early days, when undignified amusements were not declined by ladies of any age. One of these she describes as consisting of the following sort of violent fun. A large strong table-cloth was spread on the upper steps of the staircase, and upon this cloth the ladies inclined to the frolic seated themselves in rows upon the steps. Then the gentlemen, or the men, took hold of the lower end of the cloth, attempting to pull it downstairs; the ladies resisted this with all their might, and the greater the number of these delicate creatures the longer the struggle was protracted. The contest, however, invariably ended by the cloth and the ladies being pulled down to the bottom of the stairs, when everything was found bruised, except modesty. ‘High Life below Stairs’ could hardly have been too rampant in its exposition, if it really reflected what was going on above. We can hardly realize the matter. We hardly do so in merely fancying we see good Lord Shaftesbury Admiral Gambier, Baptist Noel, and Dr. M’Neil engaged in settling Miss Martineau, Catherine Sinclair, the “Authoress of Amy Herbert,” and Mrs. Fry on a table-cloth upon the stairs, and hauling them down in a heap to the bottom. It would be highly indecorous; but, I am almost ashamed to say, I should like to see it.
In 1748 George II. happened to see that gallant French equestrian, the Duchess of Bedford, on horseback, in a riding-habit of blue turned up with white. At that time there was a discussion on foot, touching a general uniform for the navy: the appearance of the Duchess settled the question. George II. was so delighted with her Grace’s appearance, that he commanded the adoption of those colours; and that accounts perhaps for the fact, that sailors on a spree are ever given to getting upon horseback, where they do not at all look like the Duchess whose colours they wear.
Taste was undoubtedly terribly perverted in this century. Some ladies took their footmen with them into their box at the play; others married actors, and their noble fathers declared they would have more willingly pardoned their daughters had they married lacqueys rather than players. A daughter of the Earl of Abingdon married Gallini the ballet-master, of whom George III. made a “Sir John”; and Lady Harriet Wentworth did actually commit the madness of marrying her footman,—a madness that had much method in it. This lady, the daughter of Lord Rockingham, transacted this matter in the most business-like way imaginable. She settled a hundred a year for life on her husband, but directed her whole fortune besides to pass to her children, should she have any; otherwise, to her own family. She moreover “provided for a separation, and ensured the same pin-money to Damon, in case they part.” She gave away all her fine clothes, and surrendered her titles: “linen and gowns,” she said, “were properest for a footman’s wife;” and she went to her husband’s family in Ireland as plain Mrs. Henrietta Sturgeon.
It is characteristic of the manners of this period, that Lady Harriet Wentworth, in marrying her footman, was not considered as having so terribly dérogé as Lady Susan Fox, Lord Ilchester’s daughter, who in the same year, 1764, married O’Brien the actor, a man well to do, and who owned a villa at Dunstable. The actor had contrived something of the spirit of farce in carrying out his plot. He succeeded so well in imitating the handwriting of Lady Susan’s dearest friend, Lady Sarah Bunbury, that Lord Ilchester delivered the letters to his daughter with his own hand, and without suspicion. The couple used to meet at Miss Read’s, the artist;—that is, Catherine Read, who painted whole bevies of our grandmothers, and whose portraits of young Queen Charlotte and of that dreadful woman Mrs. Macauley (represented as a Roman matron weeping over the lost liberties of her country) were the delight of both connoisseurs and amateurs.
The meetings of the lovers became known to the lady’s proud sire, and terrible was the scene which ensued between the “père noble” and the “ingénue.” The latter however promised to break off all intercourse, provided she were permitted to take one last farewell. She waited a day or two, till she was of age; and then, “instead of being under lock and key in the country, walked downstairs, took her footman, said she was going to breakfast with Lady Sarah, but would call at Miss Read’s; in the street, pretended to recollect a particular cap in which she was to be drawn; sent the footman back for it, whipped into a hackney chair, was married at Covent Garden Church, and set out for Mr. O’Brien’s villa at Dunstable.”
This marriage was, as I have said, thought worse of than if the bridegroom had been a lacquey. The latter appear to have been in singular esteem, dead or living. Thus we read that the Duchess of Douglas, in 1765, having lost a favourite footman rather suddenly in Paris, she had him embalmed, and went to England, with the body of “Jeames” tied on in front of her chaise. “A droll way of being chief mourner,” says Walpole, who adds some droll things upon the English whom he encountered in journeying through France. When half a mile from Amiens, he met a coach and four with an equipage of French, and a lady in pea-green and silver, a smart hat and feather, and two suivantes. “My reason told me,” says the lively Horace, “it was the Archbishop’s concubine; but luckily my heart whispered that it was Lady Mary Coke. I jumped out of my chaise, fell on my knees, and said my first Ave Maria, gratiâ plena!”
The esteem of the ladies for their liveried servitors does not appear to have been in all cases reciprocal, if we may believe a circumstance which took place at Leicester House, the residence of the Prince of Wales, in 1743, when one of his Royal Highness’s coachmen, who used to drive the maids of honour, was so sick of them, that he left his son three hundred pounds upon condition that he never married a maid of honour!
There was laxity both of manners and dress as time went on; and as we were an ill-dressed, so were we an ill-washed people. In the latter half of the last century we were distinguished as the only people in Europe who sat down to dinner without “dressing” or washing of hands. Indeed we were for a long time “not at all particular.”
Fashions, cleanly or otherwise, often come by the clever exercise of wit. Thus the Russian confraternity made little fortunes through a well-timed joke perpetrated by Count Rostopchin. And the joke was cut after the following fashion. The Emperor Paul had an undisguised contempt for Russian princes, and loved to lower their dignity. He was one day surrounded by a glittering crowd of them, attired in gold lace and dirty shirts, when he carelessly asked his favourite Count Rostopchin, how it happened that he had never gained the slight distinction of being created a prince. “Well, your Majesty,” said the Count, “it arises entirely from the circumstance that my ancestors, who were originally Tartars, came to settle in Russia just as winter was setting in.” “And what of that?” asked Paul. “Why,” answered the Count, “whenever a Tartar chief appeared at court for the first time, the sovereign left it to his option either to be made a prince or to receive the gift of a pelisse. Now as it was hard mid-winter when my grandfather arrived at court, he had sense enough to prefer the pelisse to the princeship.” This satire gave the fashion to the Rostopchin cloaks, of which our grandfathers who travelled in Russia used to tell long stories, that were not half so good as Rostopchin’s brief wit.
Here was a fashion arising from a joke; but they have been as often “set” by very serious causes. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, the prevailing colour in all dresses was that shade of brown called the “couleur Isabelle,” and this was its origin. A short time after the siege of Ostend commenced in 1601, Isabella Eugenia, Gouvernante of the Netherlands, incensed at the obstinate bravery of the defenders, is said to have made a vow that she would not change her chemise till the town surrendered. It was a marvellously inconvenient vow, for the siege, according to the precise historians thereof, lasted three years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours; and her highness’s garment had wonderfully changed its colour before twelve months of the time had expired. The ladies and gentlemen of the court resolved to keep their mistress in countenance, and after a struggle between their loyalty and their cleanliness, they hit upon the compromising expedient of wearing dresses of the presumed colour finally attained by the garment which clung to the Imperial Archduchess by force of religious obstinacy—and something else.
Mrs. Sherwood offers us, in her posthumous ‘Life,’ a fair picture of the fashion and simplicity of the good old country rector in the last century, as regards the adorning of the outer man. Her father, the Rev. Dr. Butt, was Rector of Kidderminster; he is the hero of the story, which Mrs. Sherwood shall tell herself.
“My father was invited to dine at Lord Stamford’s, at his seat at Enville, not very distant from Kidderminster.
“It was the custom, when he was to go out, for some competent person to arrange his best cloth suit on a sofa in his study, his linen and stockings being in a wardrobe in the same room. On this day he was very much engaged in writing. However, thinking that he would be quite prepared when apprised that John and the horses were ready, he laid down his pen at an early hour, and dressed himself, laying his old black suit, neatly folded, as was his wont, on the sofa, from whence he had taken the best one; this being done, to make the best of his time, he sat down to write again, till admonished that the horses were waiting. ‘Bless me!’ he cried, ‘and I not dressed!’ and he hurried himself to put on again fresh linen and another pair of silk stockings, whilst, as his old coat and waistcoat, which lay where the new ones ought to have been, came most naturally to hand, they were put on, and a great coat over all concealed the mischief from John and my mother; and away he drove, reaching Enville but a little time before dinner. My father happened to know Lord Stamford’s butler, an old and valued servant; and as he stopped in the hall to take off his great coat, Mr. Johnson, having looked hard at his attire, said, ‘My dear Sir, you have a large hole in your elbow, and the white lining is visible.’ ‘Indeed!’ said my father; ‘how can that be?’—and, after some reflection, he made out the truth as it really had happened. ‘Well!’ said Mr. Johnson, not a little amazed with the story, ‘come to my room, and we will see what is to be done.’ So he took my father, who was in high glee at the joke, into his own precincts, and brushed him, and inked his elbow, and put him into better order than the case at first seemed possible (sic). When all was complete, he said, ‘Now, Sir, go into the drawing-room; set a good face on the matter; say not a word on the subject; and my life for it, not a lady or gentleman will find you out.’ My father promised to be vastly prudent; and as he was always equally at home in every company, on the principle of feeling that every man was his brother, he was not in the least disturbed by the consciousness of his old coat and inked elbow. Thus everything went on prosperously until dinner was nearly over. My dear father, having probably, as usual, found the means of putting everybody in good humour about him, he turned towards the butler, and said, ‘Johnson, it must not be lost!’ The good man frowned and shook his head, but all in vain. ‘It is much too good, Johnson,’ he added; ‘though you are ever so angry with me, I must tell it.’ And then out came the whole story, to the great delight of the whole noble party present, and to the lasting gratification of my father himself; for he never failed to be highly pleased whenever he told the story; and it was no small addition to the tale, to tell of the scolding he got, before he came away, from the honest butler, whose punctilio he had most barbarously wounded.”
Since the beginning of the present century, the laws of fashion have been more stringent, those of taste ever execrable. Taste, in its true sense, and as applied to costume, has never of late been
“The admiration
Of this short-coated population,—
This sew’d-up race, this button’d nation,—
Who, while they boast their laws so free,
Leave not one limb at liberty;
But live, with all their lordly speeches,
The slaves of buttons and tight breeches.”
Even George IV. and his favourites could not bless or curse the nation with a taste for dress. After all, we are better off in that respect than the Italians of the last century, who were accustomed to walk abroad without hats, and with parasols and fans; and we do not desire to see Kensington Gardens like that at Schesmedscher, near Bucharest, of the figures on which gay stage the correspondent of the ‘Daily News’ thus graphically speaks:—
“From three o’clock in the afternoon till an hour after sunset the place is crowded with boyards, boyardines, and the sons and daughters of the same, shopkeepers, peasants, gipsies, officers, and cadets, without any distinction of rank, but all dressed regardless of expense, and swaggering in thoroughly peacock pride. We have matter-of-fact people, practical people, go-ahead people, ingenious people, etc., but without exception this is the ‘dressiest’ people of Europe. To see the manner in which the young people fig themselves out here, one might imagine that millinery, hosiery, and tailors’ goods were a profitable investment of capital. When one has been awhile in the East one generally ceases to wonder at varieties of costume; but the beau monde of Bucharest in holiday attire might well rouse the most nonchalant or phlegmatic into surprise and attention. Fashions of dress seldom remain long in one’s memory. The man who this year enters the Park with a terribly broad-brimmed hat does not remember for a moment that twelve months previously he would have been miserable had he worn one with a brim more than an eighth of an inch wide. It needs engravings to call up really vivid recollections of what one’s-self, as well as every one else, wore ten, twenty, or thirty years ago; and Bucharest recalls very vividly a certain class of engravings. Every one is familiar with those splendid works of art which represent his Majesty George III. reviewing the Middlesex Volunteers in Hyde Park, the Pump Room in Bath, Charing-cross at the period of the erection of Nelson’s Column, or any other remarkable scene as it appeared in the days of that illustrious individual, Mr. Brummell. Your readers well remember the broad-crowned Caroline hats, the short-waisted coats, the long-tailed surtouts, the ‘pumps’ and Hessian boots, in which fashionables strutted at that period. All this, and more, is to be seen here. Young men walk about in sky-blue cutaway coats with brass buttons and shockingly short skirts, trousers almost as tight as the ancient pantaloons, and cream-coloured kid gloves. Others appear on promenade with coats whose tails descend to their heels, and others again in all the brilliancy of the latest Paris fashions. The contrast and mélange are curious and infinitely amusing, and the display of jewellery is immense. In short, in London I would take the proudest man in the place for a linendraper’s shopman in his Sunday clothes. It is in the article of gloves however that most extravagance is displayed. White or cream-coloured is the colour de rigueur. Present yourself to a Wallachian lady to pay a visit, with your hands cased in anything more durable, and you excite as great a sensation as if you walked into a London drawing-room in top-boots. Nor must you go about the town on foot; a birtcha, or two-horse open hackney carriage or calèche, at two zwanzigers an hour, is indispensable. The vehicles are however generally very good and clean, and the drivers civil; disputes about fares are unknown.”
A portion of the above looks like a scene in a pantomime, and this induces me to offer a remnant or two of remark connected with stage costumes.