DURING THE EIGHTEENTH AND THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
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BY FAYETTE ROBINSON.
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(Continued from page 198.)
Nor does the following present a much greater difference, and, but for the ear-rings and knee-breeches, would pass muster even now amid our infinite varieties of palelots, sacks and Hongroises. The boot-black represented in the cut is a miniature bonnet-rouge.
It is worth while to state that costumes, like opinions, reproduce themselves. As the ideas which were once in vogue, and have been abandoned, return and resume their influence and orthodoxy, so do the costumes of other days continually reappear, it is true, with a difference often striking enough, for men no longer wear either coats of mail or inexpressibles of velvet, yet the Norman cloak of the Black Prince, and the sack of Lauzun, the handsome French colonel, who, during our own Revolutionary war, turned the heads and carried away the hearts of half the women of Philadelphia, are still every day to be seen.
The same thing is observable in female costume. The long waists, tight sleeves and full skirts of old times have returned, and even the ungainly ruffs of Queen Elizabeth’s age have shown a disposition to return. The mode of dressing the hair is also retracing itself, so that there is little real difference between the traditional court-dress of former times and that of every-day life worn at present, except the train.
The following is a caricature of that day, but scarcely more outré than the bearded creatures from time to time seen in our own streets. It may be remarked that the passion for hair on the face always is consequent on a war. In the time of Henri IV, all the world was bearded; so during the days of Cromwell were his ironsides, and now men who never saw a shot fired, force the sublime into the ridiculous, by parading a moustache in every thoroughfare throughout the country.