Truly, to see our princes all alone, sitting at their meat, though beleaguered with talkers, whisperers, and gazing beholders, I have often rather pitied than envied them. The honour we receive from those who fear and stand in awe of us is no true honour. "Service holds few, though many hold service."
Every man's manners and his mind
His fortune for him frame and find.
IV.—Of the Use of Apparel
I was devising in this chill-cold season whether the fashion of these late-discovered nations to go naked be a custom forced by the hot temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and Moors, or whether it be an original manner of mankind. My opinion is, that even as all plants, trees, living creatures, are naturally furnished with protection against all weathers, even so were we. But like those who by artificial light quench the brightness of day, so we have spoilt our proper covering by what we have borrowed. Nations under the same heaven and climate as our own, or even colder, have no knowledge of clothes. Moreover, the tenderest parts of us are ever bare and naked—our eyes, face, mouth, nose, ears; and our country swains, like their forefathers, go bare-breasted to their middles.
Had we been born needing petticoats and breeches nature would have armed that which she has left to the battery of the seasons with some thicker skin or hide, as she has our finger ends and the soles of our feet.
"How many men in Turkey go naked for devotion's sake?" a certain man demanded of one of our loitering rogues whom in the depth of winter he saw wandering up and down with nothing but his shirt about him, yet as blithe and lusty as another that keeps himself muffled up to the ears in furs. "And have not you, good sir," answered he, "your fate all bare? Imagine I am all face."
The Italians say that when the Duke of Florence asked his fool how, being so ill-clad, he could endure the cold, he replied, "Master, use but my receipt, and put all the clothes you have on you, as I do all mine, and you shall feel no more cold than I do."
King Massinissa, were it never so sharp weather, always went bareheaded. So did the Emperor Severus. In the battle of the Egyptians and Persians, Herodotus noticed that of those slain the Egyptians had skulls much harder than the Persians, by reason that these go ever with their heads covered with coifs and turbans, while those are from infancy shaven and bareheaded. King Agesilaus wore his clothes alike winter and summer. Suetonius says Cæsar always marched at the head of his troops, and most commonly bareheaded and on foot, whether the sun shone or whether it rained. The like is reported of Hannibal.
Plato, for the better health and comfort of the body, earnestly persuades that no man should ever give feet or head other cover than nature had allotted them.
We Frenchmen are accustomed to array ourselves strangely in parti-coloured suits (not I, for I seldom wear any but black and white, like my father) to protect ourselves against the cold, but what should we do in cold like that Captain Martyn du Bellay describes—frosts so hard that the wine had to be chopped up with axes and shared to the soldiers by weight?