which I am convinced nothing else could
have imparted. About the same time I saw
the young Roscius—no longer young, it is
true, nor anything of a Roscius, but still a
star at country theatres. He played
Alexander the Great, of course in unapproachable
style ; but none of his rolling periods, his
fire, his fury, his love, his madness—though
he tore every passion to tatters, to very rags
—weighed anything in the balance against
himself, when I saw him the next day, in
private life, sublimely swaggering across
Richmond Green, in a shining pair of
tasselled Hessians ! To this very hour Mr.
William Henry West Betty, in boots,
infinitely transcends whatever idea I may have
formed of Alexander the Great. The
Macedonian phalanx turned out, I dare say, a very
formidable set of fellows, but I could better
have understood the prestige which attended
them had their nether limbs, instead of buskins,
been arrayed in Hessian boots. Alas
for the decadence of all that is great and
grand ! I believe that at this moment only
two pair of Hessians can be found in daily
perambulation of our vast metropolis—one
pair devoted to the service of the excise, the
other to that of the medical profession. What
must be the feelings of the owners of these
boots, as they pass the celebrated mart of
Warren in the Strand, where the chief
attraction in the windows used to be the well-
known picture of a tomcat showing himself
before the mirror-like surface of a polished
Hessian ! Exultation, perhaps, at the thought
that they only, out of all the peripatetic
multitude, are still masters of the situation ;
sorrow, possibly, to think that when their
boots have ceased to shine, none will be left
to replace them.

But, lament as we may the decline of this
particular boot, the philosopher, who knows
that all that's bright must fade, the brightest
still the fleetest—can yet derive consolation
from the fact—especially if his legs be none
of the straightest—that Hessians are not
adapted to everybody's wear. It is true
there are other boots which come very nearly
under the same category ; but who, for
example, ever saw a philosopher in a neat pair
of tops ? I am not, however, presenting this
subject for the consideration of philosophers,
who, of all people, ought to be content to
take things as they find them, although they
very seldom are so. Setting them, then, aside,
I proceed with the sort of boots which I have
just mentioned. The wearers of tops at
the present day are almost entirely sporting
characters (including, of course, grooms and
tigers), obsolete farmers, and heavy graziers.
Yet it requires no great stretch of memory to
recal the time when some of the leading men
about town never appeared abroad without
them. The Duke of Dorset, Sir Francis
Burdett, and Mr. Byng, well-known as their
persons were, would hardly, I think, have
been recognised had they paraded, what Sam
Slick calls their larger limbs, in any other
integuments. It is, indeed, reported of the
first named of these three gentlemen, that he
always slept in his. If we go back a little
further—say, to the Tom and Jerry era—we
shall find that there was scarcely a sprig of
fashion, or a sprig's imitator, who did not
sport, as the chief article of his costume, an
unexceptionable pair of tops. A little earlier
still, and we find the top-boot holding almost
equal sway with the Hessian over the legs of
the lieges. It was commended to fashionable
use by the special coquetry of being worn with
a grey silk stocking, the top being pushed
down just far enough to reveal a finger's
breadth of the glistening hose. But general as
the custom was of appearing in top-boots,
there were not wanting many who considered
it an act of great daring, not to say a sort of
tempting of Providence, to put them on for the
first time. The sensations caused by the first
pair of tops were singularly strange. They
were something akin to intoxication, but with
a heavier sense of responsibility. As to walking
straight in them, for the first hour or two,
the thing was impossible ; the knees seemed
to give way, the legs to divaricate, and one
had a confused notion that the joints, like
those of puppets, worked inversely to the
design of nature. Even at the best of times,
when use had made them familiar, there was
a kind of swaggering bow-leggedness which
did not arise from continuous contact with
the pigskin, but appeared to be a necessary
result of wearing top-boots. It was, perhaps,
owing to this independent flourish of the
booted extremities, that the articles which
imparted it were so much in request. With
regard to the general effect of top-boots upon
the juvenile or feminine mind, as compared
with that produced by Hessians, I should say
it was as the distinction between graceful
agility and ponderous magnificence. The first
was the impersonation of light comedy, the
last of gorgeous tragedy ; one was a brilliant
scintillation, the other a sombre reality. But
both were adored.

The imperial jack-boot, to which the eye is
now beginning to accustom itself, was until
within the last few years almost a tradition.
It was associated dimly, but grandly, with
Jonathan Wild, the Marquis of Granby,
Bagshot Heath, Her Majesty's Horse Guards,
and the Field of Fontenoy. To think of
drawing on or plunging into boots so
imposing, even had they been available for
general use—which they were not—never
entered into the scheme of the sober-minded
man of the first half of the nineteenth
century. One could not bring oneself to
believe that such boots were made of mere
leather, they savoured so much of the ogre,
their aspect was so intensely, so
preternaturally warlike ; rhinoceros skin, or the
hide of the castle-bearing elephant, seemed
the more appropriate material. To have
imagined them without the clank of iron