manner of dressing as graceful as that of the
Hellenes, which, in fact, it greatly resembled:
we allude to the tunics and mantles of the
Anglo-Saxons. The thing was too good to last; and
it has been extinct ever since the days of the
Norman conquest, if, indeed, it did not succumb
to continental fashions, in all but the lower
orders, during the reign of Edward, the
Confessor.

Eccentricity of costume became frequent in
this country after the Norman invasion. As
early as the reign of William the Second, the
old chronicler, William of Malmesbury, speaks
of the "extravagant dress" of the courtiers, and
of "the fashion of shoes with curved points,"
which seem to have been invented by one of the
Earls of Anjou to conceal the deformity of his
feet, but which, like other ugly things, had such
a tenacity of existence that they were found
constantly reappearing for several centuries,
notwithstanding various ordinances for their
regulation or suppression. In the reign of
Edward the Third, the ends were curved so
high that golden chains were attached to them,
and looped up to the knees; so that the
conquerors of France literally went about in fetters
of their own imposing. At an earlier period—
viz. in the days of Edward the First— the
ladies had a fancy for muffling up their throats
and the sides of their heads with some species
of wrapper, as Welshwomen do even now.
We see the fashion represented in the
portraits of Mrs. Siddons in Lady Constance.
Mrs. Siddons, indeed, always appeared on
the stage with a velvet band over the
forehead—for what reason, it would be hard to
say.

It is a noticeable feature in the mutations
of fashion, that the freaks of bad taste have
been chiefly visible on the side of undue
muffling of the person. No doubt, times
have been when court ladies laid themselves
open to the very contrary charge; but these
are quite the exceptions. The tendency in
the modern world, even in hot climates, has
generally been to excess of clothing. This (in
European countries, at least) was the result of
Gothicism, the good and the evil of which
sprang up equally from the absence of simplicity.
On the favourable side we have to place that
fantastic richness of ornament and glow of
colour which give the splendour of a pageant to
the domestic history of the feudal times; on the
unfavourable side lies the tendency to wild
extravagance and uncouth conceits. And this
tendency survived the extinction of feudalism,
and is dominant in many ways even yet. The
male costume of the time of Shakespeare was
gorgeous, but grotesque; and female dress was
never so atrocious. It is impossible to conceive
anything more execrable, more thoroughly
barbarous, than the appearance of Queen Elizabeth
in the portraits with which we are all familiar.
Not only is the neck encircled with a stiff collar,
and flanked by a rigid ruff, but the very head is
backed by two preposterous wings of muslin,
spread out vampire-fashion; while the paltry
little frizzled curls, twisted into angular knots,
and loaded with jewels, are surmounted by a
hat which covers nothing that need be covered,
and a plume which seems to droop with the
consciousness of its own absurdity. The
fantastical, both in male and female costume,
reached its height in that reign and the next.
The peg-top trousers of the present day, unmanly
as they are, in their assimilation of the male to
the female figure, are nothing in comparison
with the swelling, huge-hipped breeches of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These
were stuffed out with horse-hair, wool, and flax,
and seem to have made as great encroachments
on the public space as the skirts of our better
halves do now. In the early years of Elizabeth's
reign, it was actually found necessary to erect
round the inside of the Houses of Parliament
a scaffolding for the express accommodation of
those noble lords and honourable members who
were determined to be in the extreme of the
fashion. The monstrosity went out of vogue in
1565, but came in again in the reign of James
the First. A sumptuary law was passed against
these enormous "small-clothes;" but of course
it was frequently broken.

A good story is told by an old author, to
the effect that a man who was cited before a
court of justice for offending against the inflated
small-clothes' law, declared that such garments
formed his safest storehouse, and straightway
produced from certain occult recesses sundry
sheets, two tablecloths, ten napkins, four shirts,
and abundance of linen and other necessaries;
adding, that he had yet great store which
remained unshown. The story is of course a
joke, invented by some witty fellow of that time,
who, if he lived now, would probably be a
contributor to Punch, and an assistant to Mr.
Leech in ridiculing the excesses of crinoline.
Equally fantastic were the beards of the
Shakespearean epoch. To twist and cut that stately
appendage into the most quaint and ridiculous
shapes was the great art of the barber. We see
some strange specimens now-a-days; but they
would look tame beside the oddities which men
were pleased to carry about on their faces
between two and three centuries ago. People
fashioned their beards in much the same manner
as they did the yew-trees and privet hedges in
their gardens, and cared little for deformities if
they could only hit upon something novel and
peculiar.

Perhaps the best modern costume ever seen
in England was that of the more cultivated and
less fanatical of the Puritans. Though sober,
it was not formal, gloomy, nor drab-coloured;
and, while it was a good, honest, every-day dress,
fit for the workshop, the study, and the battle-
field, it was susceptible of no inconsiderable
richness upon occasion, and was at all times dignified
and refined. We have had more splendid and
more picturesque garments; none which have
so admirably answered the rough necessities of
modern life, while preserving a due regard to
the graces of form. Yet the fashion was doomed
to a speedy extinction, in the gorgeous, but