When I look at pictures of people of old times, I often think what a curious thing it is that the only apparent difference between them and the people of the present day is to be seen in their clothes.
If we could take a dozen or so of ancient Greeks and Romans; some gentlemen and ladies of the middle ages; a party of our great-grandfathers and mothers, and some nice people who are now living in the next street, and were to dress all the women in calico frocks and sun-bonnets, and all the men in linen coats and trousers and broad straw hats, with their hair cut short; and were then to jumble them all up together, and make them keep their tongues quiet, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a committee, unacquainted with any of the party, to pick out the ancients, the middle-agers, or the moderns.
Lady Jane Grey, or Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, or Helen of Troy, would not look unlike the other women in sun-bonnets and calico frocks; and while there would be a greater difference in the men, whose nationality might show more strongly, Christopher Columbus, Nero, and Marco Bozzaris would be pretty much the same kind of fellows as the other men of the party.
It is certainly a fact that there are a great many more points of strong resemblance between the people of past ages and ourselves than most of us suppose. It is often very surprising, when reading of the domestic life of the past, to see how precisely similar, in some respects, it was to our own. And, as I have said, the people looked, with the exception of their clothes, very much as we do—meaning by "we" the people of the present day, all over the world.
In 1876, at the Centennial Exposition, I saw a marble bust—life size—which was a portrait of a lady of ancient Rome. There was only the head and neck, the hair was dressed very plainly, and it was astonishing how well that bust would have answered for the portrait of a lady of Thirty-fourth street, New York, or the wife of a gentleman in Springfield, Ohio. The head and face were just such a head and face as I had often seen, and the countenance even seemed familiar to me.
But dress makes all the difference in the world. Had I met that lady attired in her flowing Roman garments, with her golden head-dress and her sandaled feet, I should have had no thought of Thirty-fourth street, or Springfield, Ohio.
And so down the whole line of ages you can tell, pretty nearly, when a man or a woman lived, if you can but get an idea of his or her clothes.
The next thing which strikes most of us when looking at the pictures of old-time people, is a feeling of wonder how they ever could have been willing to make such scarecrows of themselves.
To be sure, we are willing to admire the flowing robes of Greece and Rome, although we feel quite sure that our style of dress is much more sensible, and we have an admiration for a soldier clad in armor, as well as for the noblemen and gentry who figured, some hundreds of years ago, in their splendid velvets and laces, their feathers and cocked hats, and their diamond-hilted swords.
But, as a rule, the garments of our ancestors appear very ridiculous to us. If we did not have good reasons for belief to the contrary, we should be very apt to consider them a set of fools.