Speaking of Colchis, it was there that the best materials for painting were formerly procured. Besides, if you will ascend in spirit to the days of old, you will perceive every year on the roads leading from Georgia to the principal cities of India, as well as to Dimbeck, an immense drove of two thousand camels, loaded with madder. Thence the red[[3]] flowers were derived, of which Strabo speaks, which the nations dwelling on the borders of the Indus and the Ganges loved to spread upon their cloths. It is a particular worthy of remark that the Egyptians who constantly clothed the statues of their goddess Isis with linen and cotton drapery, never employed wool for that purpose, a substance which they hated so much that they did not permit the use of it, even in interments, as the 44th chapter of Ezekiel informs us. This aversion extended even to shepherds, for you may read in Genesis that every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. (46.)
The purple of Tyre was known at an epoch exceedingly remote, and the dyers of Phœnicia surpassed in skill those of all the other nations of the east. This people came a thousand years ago as far as Great Britain to procure an enormous quantity of tin, a metal which has the property, or rather certain salts of it have, of augmenting the intensity of the principal red colors contained in many vegetable and animal substances. Upon this subject, we would advise you to run over, in the third book of Strabo, the interesting recital which he gives of the pursuit of a Phœnician vessel by a Roman bark, which wished to seize the tin with which it was freighted. It was in the neighborhood of the coast of Cornwall: the Phœnician, seeing the prow of the Roman near his stern, threw three-fourths of his cargo overboard, and steered right upon a sand-bank, where the enemy, as you may well suppose, did not think of following him. The Tyrians, astonished at the great opulence which their city attained, attributed to the gods the magic art of dyeing in purple. All writers, and especially Ctesias, physician to a king of Persia, who lived four hundred years before the Christian era, and Ælian, a contemporary of Alexander Severus, frequently allude to an insect, to which the Phœnicians were indebted for the superior manner in which they could produce an admirable scarlet. It was evidently the cochineal: and this little animal must have been at that time less rare than at present in Syria, India, and Persia, since the humblest classes frequently wore stuffs dyed with purple. It is not surprising that they knew not how to extract from the cochineal the most brilliant of all the known reds, the carmine, before which the vermillion grows pale, and which chemistry can procure for us, in our days, in great abundance; and you know that this little insect lives upon the cactus which grow in Brazil, in Mexico, at Jamaica, and at Saint Domingo.
The fashion of wearing silk was unknown at Rome, before the beginning of the empire. The rage for dressing in it was already so great in the time of Tiberius, that the emperor prohibited the use of it by a positive law. The Greeks also had a taste for it; and the cloak of Amphion was certainly of silk, for the historian Philostratus (Ion, Book I.) tells us that its color changed according to the different ways in which the light was reflected from it. Pliny gives us to understand that the gold stuffs of the ancients were not made as those of our time, of a thread of gold or silver, wrapped around a woof of silk, but that they were woven of gold deprived of all alloy: knowing this, he speaks of the manner in which the wife of Claudius dressed herself to attend a Naumachia or sea fight, in the following terms—“Nos vidimus Agrippinam—indutam palludamento auro textile, sine alia materia.” It is about fifty years since they extracted, by assaying, more than four pounds weight of pure gold from some old dresses which the fathers of the Clementine College, at Rome, discovered in an urn of basalt, buried in their vineyard. Tarquin, the Elder, was he, among the Roman Sovereigns who most usually wore dresses of gold.
From the time of Homer the Greeks wore black dresses for mourning. This bard shews us Thetis wearing, after the death of Patroclus, the blackest of her dresses. (Iliad, 24.) For many years the same usage prevailed among the Romans, but it was partly changed under the emperors, so that when Plutarch wrote, the women in mourning could wear nothing but white. Besides, we have a proof of it at the obsequies of Septimius Severus: “The image of this emperor,” Herodian tells us, “formed of wax, was surrounded on one side by a row of women in white, and on the other by the body of all the senators, clothed in black. At the death of the Empress Plotina,” adds the historian, “her husband Trajan covered himself with very black habits for the space of nine days.” The toga necessarily received as many shades of color as the other garments: but as to the form of this kind of robe it is impossible to decide. When Dionysius, of Halicarnassus, asserts that the toga presented the appearance of a semicircle (’ημικυκλος) he did not at all intend to describe its shape, but only the form which it assumed when worn upon the body. Strabo asserts that the military cloak with which the warriors clothed themselves had an oval form; and that among the Athenians it was often worn by the young people even in time of peace. The tunic, which was the principal part of the under clothing, was not generally used among the nations of antiquity, except the Greeks and Romans; all the Cynic philosophers disdained to make use of it. We know that Augustus put on as many as four tunics in winter. The name of this great emperor reminds us that it was in his reign, or thereabouts, that the Romans began to use table-cloths. Montfaucon believes that the greater part of them were of cloth striped with gold and purple. In France the ancient table-cloths were intended for collecting, after the meal, the smallest crumbs that were left, that nothing might be lost; and D’Arcy informs you that among our neighbors, the English, table linen was very seldom used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
As there exist in our days many nations, especially in the torrid zone, who do not wear hats, (a name by which we must understand every covering for the head, as its etymology plainly indicates,) so it formerly happened that the nations did not always think of making use of them. Thus one of the most civilized, the Egyptians, went bare-headed, according to the authority of Hesiod. Amongst the Orientals, and especially amongst the Persians, the turban was in great vogue; that of the sovereign was composed of a whole bale of muslin. It was from this last mentioned people that the Jews derived the turban. The hats of the Greeks must have had very large brims, to judge from the root of the word (πετασος) which designated them. The Romans granted to their freedmen the right of covering themselves with a kind of cap, which has been since adopted as the emblem of liberty. It is to a Swiss, residing in Paris, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, that we owe the first invention of felt hats. They were generally known at the close of the reign of Charles VII.: this monarch himself wore one at his triumphal entry into Rouen, in 1449. We read in Daniel that the worthy townsmen of that ancient city stood still as if petrified, so much were they astonished at seeing his majesty’s hat; the historian adds that its lining was of red silk, and that it was surmounted by a superb bunch of feathers. Before the period of which we speak, it is probable that the French covered their heads in the same way as the English, that is to say, with woven caps or rather with cloth and silk hoods.
The stockings of the ancients were made of little pieces of cloth sewed together. We cannot say with certainty in what country the stocking-frame was invented. France, England and Spain respectively claim this useful discovery. A short time before the unfortunate tournament, in which Henry II. lost his life, he put on the first pair of silk stockings ever worn. Five years afterward, we see in England, William Ryder presenting a pair, as a very precious article, to William, Earl of Pembroke. Ryder had learnt the method of making them from an Italian merchant.
Many persons probably know not that wooden shoes date from a very remote period; for the Jews wore them long before the age of Augustus. Perhaps they were not made exactly like the wooden shoes so common among the poorer classes in France; but it is not less true that this kind of covering for the feet was generally adopted among nearly all the people of Judæa: sometimes, however, we observe leather shoes among them; and the Jewish soldiers covered their feet with copper, or with iron. The shoes of the Egyptians were of papyrus; the Chinese and the Indians manufactured theirs of silk, of rushes, of the bark of trees, of iron, of brass, of gold or of silver, according as their fortune permitted, or their fancy dictated. At Rome, as in Greece, leather was the material which covered the feet of every one. The Roman women wore white shoes: the common people wore black: and the magistrates set off their feet with red shoes on solemn occasions. A thousand years ago the most powerful sovereigns of Europe had wooden soles to their shoes. Under William Rufus, son of the great Duke of Normandy, who conquered at Hastings, in 1066, a fashion was introduced into England of giving to the shoes an excessive length; the point which terminated them was stuffed with tow, and curved up on high like a ram’s horn. In the fourteenth century they thought of connecting these points with the knee, by means of a gold chain. Great must have been the surprise of the worthy Anglo-Saxons, on beholding this strange species of vegetation sprouting up suddenly amongst them! Some called to remembrance the history of the serpent’s teeth, which Cadmus sowed, whence a swarm of soldiers issued; others conceived that it was the costume of magicians; and little children sometimes, when going to bed, asked their mothers if there was no danger that their heads might be metamorphosed in the night into those of a horrible deer? Before leaving this paragraph upon shoes, we would call to recollection the antiquity of the art of the leather-dresser: open for that purpose the Iliad, and you will find in the Seventeenth Book, tanners preparing skins to make leather of them. This class of manufacturers composed, three hundred years ago, a very important body, since we possess the account of a furious quarrel which broke out, under Queen Elizabeth, between them and the shoe-makers. We are pleased to record here the perfection with which they manufacture leather at this date in the New World. In South Carolina, as well as in the state of Virginia, the Indian women are so skilful in this branch of industry that a single person can dress as many as ten deer-skins a day.[[4]] Of all the transformations which are wrought in the arts, that of the animal substance into leather is, without doubt, one of the most curious. The process, by means of which they set about accomplishing it in old times, was the result of a calculation still more ingenious than that of changing two opaque bodies into a transparent body to make glass, for instance; or else two transparent bodies into an opaque body for making soap. Besides, you know that chemistry actually teaches us that leather is a real salt, a tannate of gelatine. This assertion was not uttered with confidence until M. Pelouze had extracted from tan in late years the tannic acid in a state of remarkable purity. Besides this, you may now explain a phenomena which is repeated at a great distance upon the ocean, at the time of some lamentable shipwreck. The journal which records for you the history of one of these sad events often tells you that in the last moment of famine, the unhappy survivors took to eating their shoes, and that life is sometimes prolonged by these means! Certainly, for the gelatine possesses nutritious properties, even when its peculiarities are stained with a thousand impurities, as is leather.
The subject upon which we have endeavored to present some observations, is so capable of being extended that a large volume in octavo would scarcely suffice to contain all the historical knowledge relating to it. But such a dissertation, carried out to the extent or with the exactness which it admits of, would only constitute at last a kind of catalogue or bare enumeration of the thousand modifications which human vestures have undergone down to our times. The memory of the reader would be unable to retain so prodigious a number of minute particulars, and the curiosity of his mind, fatigued by so many useless details, would be extinguished before finishing the third part. These changes have often, it is true, nothing for their object but the accessory and secondary parts of dress, as the following passage, which we meet with in the voyages of M. de Chateaubriand, seems to point out.
“One thing has at the same time struck me and charmed me; I have met in the dress of the Auvergne peasant the attire of the Breton peasant. Whence comes this? It is because there was formerly for this kingdom, and for all Europe, a groundwork of a common attire.” (Vol. 2., p. 296.)
In another particular also, men have always been constant, that they have never ceased to seek for the material to compose their clothing from the animals which the Creator has placed in their respective climates. It will probably be the same till the end of the world. It is thus that the nations under the temperate zone have recourse for covering to wool, because, being a bad conductor of caloric, it prevents the escape of it from their bodies. In the frozen zone the Russians, the Esquimaux, and the Greenlanders, clothe themselves in furs, a material which is a still worse conductor of caloric; while the natives of countries under the influence of the torrid zone, make their dresses of hair or horse-hair, whose conducting properties are in an inverse ratio to those of furs. It is worth remarking that the animals which in temperate regions are covered with wool or ordinary hair, are provided, when they inhabit countries really cold, with an under-fleece of very fine wool: it is the case with goats, sheep, dogs, horses, and Thibet cows.