ACT I.

HABITS AND MEN.

HABITS AND MEN,

WITH

Remnants of Record

TOUCHING

THE MAKERS OF BOTH.

BY

DR. DORAN,

AUTHOR OF ‘TABLE TRAITS,’ ‘HISTORY OF READING,’ ‘LIFE OF DR.

YOUNG,’ ETC.

“See, sitting here,

Just face to face with you, in cheery guise,

A real, live gossip; to your charities

Do I appeal, my friends.”—_T. Westwood._

_THIRD EDITION._

LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.

1855.

PRINTED BY

JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,

LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.

THESE “TRIVIAL, FOND RECORDS”

TOUCHING

Habits and Men

ARE INSCRIBED TO A GOOD MAN, OF GOOD HABITS,

TO

HENRY HOLDEN FRANKUM, ESQ.,

IN TESTIMONY OF THE ESTEEM AND REGARD ENTERTAINED FOR HIM

BY HIS VERY SINCERE FRIEND

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

BETWEEN YOU AND ME 1

MAN, MANNERS, AND A STORY WITH A MORAL TO IT 9

ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD, PART I. 26

ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD, PART II. 40

REMNANTS OF STAGE DRESSES 60

THREE ACTS AND AN EPILOGUE 67

THE TIRING-BOWERS OF QUEENS 88

“LA MODE” IN HER BIRTHPLACE 114

HATS 129

WIGS AND THEIR WEARERS 141

BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS 158

SWORDS 168

GLOVES, B⸺S, AND BUTTONS 185

STOCKINGS 200

“MASKS AND FACES” 204

PUPPETS FOR GROWN GENTLEMEN 212

TOUCHING TAILORS 227

WHY DID THE TAILORS CHOOSE ST. WILLIAM FOR THEIR PATRON? 229

THE TAILORS MEASURED BY THE POETS 240

SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, THE HEROIC TAILOR 261

GEORGE DÖRFLING, THE MARTIAL TAILOR 275

ADMIRAL HOBSON, THE NAVAL TAILOR 283

JOHN STOW, THE ANTIQUARIAN TAILOR 285

JOHN SPEED, THE ANTIQUARIAN TAILOR 296

SAMUEL PEPYS, THE OFFICIAL TAILOR 300

RICHARD RYAN, THE THEATRICAL TAILOR 309

PAUL WHITEHEAD, THE POET TAILOR 315

MEMS. OF “MERCHANT TAILORS” 322

CHAPTERS ON BEAUX 337

THE BEAUX OF THE OLDEN TIME 337

BEAU FIELDING 347

BEAU NASH 356

THE PRINCE DE LIGNE 370

BEAU BRUMMELL 378

DOCTORS READY DRESSED 395

ODD FASHIONS 402

BETWEEN YOU AND ME.

“Here, Sir, you’ll find, by way of prologue,

A choice imbroglio. Philosophy

Gay in her gravity; and Poesy

Casting her spangles on the theme of dress.

Lik’st thou’t not, no merry Christmas to thee!”

OLD PLAY.

It is remarked by Mr. T. C. Grattan, in his ‘Jacqueline of Holland,’

that the “suitableness of raiment and the becomingness of manners are

links in the chain of social life, which harmonize with and beautify the

whole. There is infinitely more wisdom,” he adds “in submitting to than

in spurning those necessary concomitants of civilization, which, being

artificial throughout, require the cement of elegance and refinement

to polish, if it cannot lighten, the chain.” I offer this pinch of

philosophy to those who like to be tempted by something didactic. I would

not, for the world, however, have them believe that I shall repeat the

temptation, or follow the example, in my illustrations of ‘Habits and

Men.’ And when I say “Men,” I would imply _man_ in its general sense,—a

sense in which “woman” has the better and more perfect half; for, as the

poet sings of Nature,—

“Her ’prentice han’

She tried on man,

An’ then she made the lasses, oh!”

The latter, consequently, will come in for their share in these trivial,

fond records. For, have not the poets loved especially to dress and

undress them? And have not the nymphs been consenting? None have defied

them, save

“Fair Rhodope, as story tells,

The bright, unearthly nymph who dwells

’Mid sunless gold and jewels hid,

The Lady of the Pyramid.”

Rhodope has been a snare to the versifiers; but I recognize in her a

lady who loved home, and dressed as well when there as her more gadding

sisters do only when abroad.

If Rhodope be the only maid who has puzzled the poets, Butler is the only

poet who has seriously libelled the maids, and their mothers. See what

the rude fellow says of ladies in their company suits and faces:—

“Yes, ’tis in vain to think to guess

At women, by appearances;

That paint and patch their imperfections

Of intellectual complexions,

And daub their tempers o’er with washes

As artificial as their faces.”

It is certainly strange that women, in earlier days, when they dealt in

neither washes nor washing, should have been gravely commended for that

less commendable fashion. Thus, Thomas of Ely lays down a very nasty

maxim when he describes the toilet of Queen St. Ethelreda:—“Quæ enim lota

erat corde, non necesse erat ut lavabatur corpore” (who was so thoroughly

well-washed in heart that she never found it necessary to wash her

person).

Very well! I only wish this lady could have been married to the Irish

Saint Angus Keledeus (_Kele De_, “God worshiper,” thence Culdees). They

would have had a nice household of it; for the gentleman in question had

the barn and the mill-work of his convent, and, as he _never_ cleaned

himself, some of the grain which stuck in his hair and about his hairy

body, used to grow as in a good soil, and then he pulled it out; gaining

a portion of his bread in this nasty field. St. Angus, all over _ears_,

would have been a novelly dressed bridegroom for Ethelreda, newly washed,

in imagination!

“Tut!” said St. Romnald, “filthy habits are the anchors by which holy

hermits are kept fast in their cells; once let them dress well and smell

nicely, and worldly people will invite them to their parties.” Depend

upon it, when Ethelreda left off her habits of cleanliness, she wickedly

thought of seducing some St. Angus to come and be her resident confessor!

A better example was shown by that saintly sovereign, Jayme II. of

Mayorca, who made ministers of his tailors, as George IV. made tailors

of his ministers, who set those useful dignitaries to work in superb

offices, wherein no profane person dared tread. On the garments made, no

profane person dared lay a hand; the number of suits was seven, for the

seven great festivals; and when these were completed, all the inhabitants

were compelled to celebrate the event by a voluntary illumination.

Certainly, Ethelreda did not sit for the original of Cowley’s ‘Clad all

in White,’ wherein he says:—

“Fairest thing that shines below,

Why in this robe dost thou appear?

Wouldst thou a white most perfect show,

Thou must at all no garment wear:

Thou wilt seem much whiter so

Than winter when ’tis clad with snow.”

But, altogether, Cowley cannot be said to dress his ladies well. He would

banish all art, just as the nymphs in hoop-petticoats banished all

nature. Herrick is the man, to my thinking, who has hit the happy medium,

in his ‘Delight in Disorder’:—

“A sweet disorder in the dress,

Kindles in clothes a playfulness.

A lawn about the shoulder thrown

Into a fine distraction;

An erring lace, which here and there

Inthrals the crimson stomacher;

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribbons to flow confusedly;

A winning wave, deserving note,

In the tempestuous petticoat;

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility;

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.”

Herrick was exquisitely taken by the “liquefaction,” as he calls it, of

his Julia’s robes, and his very heart was rumpled by their “glittering

vibration.” He dresses her in the airy fashion which Moore followed when

called upon to deck his Nora Creina:—

“The airy robe I did behold,

As airy as the leaves of gold,

Which erring here and wandering there,

Pleased with transgression ev’rywhere:

Sometimes ’twould pant, and sigh, and heave,

As if to stir it scarce had leave;

But having got it, thereupon

’Twould make a brave expansion,

And pounced with stars, it show’d to me

Like a celestial canopy.”

Göthe, that lover of many ladies, never decks one wholly, but now and

then he makes a gift interpreting his taste, as when Lamon remarks, in

the ‘Laune des Verliebten’:—

“Die Rose seh’ ich gern in einem schwarzen Haar.”

The French poets put all their swains in tight gloves and loose

principles; and their nymphs are as anxious about their dress, as though

there were _soirées_ in Tempe, and a _Longchamps_ in Arcadia. Thus

Chénier’s Naïs bids Daphnis not to crease her veil, and, with a shrewd

idea of the cost of a new frock, how snappishly does the pretty thing

reply to the invitation to recline on the shady bank:—

“Vois, cet humide gazon

Va souiller ma tunique!”

How pure, compared or not compared with this calculating nymph, is the

Madeline of Endymion Keats. The English poet undresses his young maiden

with a “niceness” that gives us as much right to look as Porphyro:—

“Her vespers done,

Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

Half-hidden, like a mermaid in seaweed,

Pensive awhile, she dreams awake.”

It is clear that this lady, although belonging to a more artificial

society than Naïs, thinks less of her dress, and more of her principles.

Not but that ladies have a fine eye for the snares by which they may

either catch or be caught.

There is something in the following, from an old Spanish ballad (‘A

aquel caballero, madre’), which proves what I say, and may be useful to

gentlemen when contemplating the subject of costume:—

To that cavalier, dear mother,

When a child, I simply told

How three kisses I would owe him:

I must pay them, now I’m old!

I am now sixteen, dear mother:

If the noble youth should come,

And call upon his little debtor,

Sighing for him here at home;—

Should he come with feathers dancing,

Helm of steel and spurs of gold,

And claim the kisses that I owe him,

I—would pay him, now I’m old!

“Hush, child! this is not the language

Worthy a Castilian maid,

One too promised to the altar,

Convent’s gloom, and cloister’s shade.

For thou’rt given to St. Cecil,

To her holy shrine thou’rt sold;—

Will not my sweet one read her missal?”

“Yes!—I’ll pay him now I’m old!”

Grave commentators on this ballad suggest, that if the cavalier had not

been a superbly dressed cavalier, the little maiden would have forgotten

her vow; and in the south of Spain, when a man is inclined to become

heedless of external adornment, he is warned of the peril of losing the

three kisses of St. Cecilia’s Nun.

But the overture to my “opera” is extending beyond due limits; and

as I have hitherto been repeating snatches from the airs of others,

I will here add, to save my honour, one of my own. It is well known

that Henrietta Maria mostly favoured the colour known as the Maiden’s

Blush,—from the rose of that pretty name. The following lines will show

HOW THE ROSE GOT ITS HUE.

One starry eve, as Psyche lay

Beneath a cistus bower’s shade,

Tearing the flowers in idle play,

Young Love came tripping by, that way,

And to the girl thus, laughing, said,—

The sweetest rose that ever eye

Yet smiled upon I plucked but now;

Pure as the stars in yon blue sky

And whiter than the flowers that lie

In wreaths about thy sunny brow.

The sweetest rose that ever spent

Its balmy store of scented bliss

About thy locks, or gently bent

Above thy bow’r, had ne’er the scent

That lies enshrined, my soul, in this.

Oh for a name, my gentle girl,

That mortals fittingly may call

This matchless rose, of flowers the pearl!—

Look, sweet, how soft the petals curl!

A name!—and thou shalt have them all.

While Love thus urged his pretty suit,

And to the blushing girl drew near,

He softly struck his golden lute,

As Psyche sat, entranced and mute,

Drinking the sounds with willing ear.

And when the golden lute was hush’d,

And Love still nearer drew, to seek

His usual meed from lips that flush’d

With softer hues than ever blush’d

Upon his own sweet mother’s cheek,—

He whisper’d something soft and low,

With arm and flower around her thrown,

That call’d upon her cheeks a glow

Which shed upon the leaves of snow

A hue still deeper than her own.

And Love, rejoicing, mark’d the rush

Of soft and rosy light that came

Upon the flower, which caught the flush

From Psyche’s cheek, whose maiden blush

Gave to the rose both hue and name.

Between the days when Psyche blushed on the rose, and the age when

Delamira bought her blushes at fifteen shillings the pot, there is a

long period;—nature at one end, and hoop-petticoats at the other. The

fashion of the latter had got so preposterous, that Mr. William Jingle,

coachmaker and chairmaker of the Liberty of Westminster, invented for

the service of the ladies “a round chair in the form of a lantern, six

yards and a half in circumference, with a stool in the centre of it;

the said vehicle being so contrived, as to receive the passenger, by

opening in two in the middle, and closing mathematically, when she is

seated.” Honest Jingle also “invented a coach for the reception of one

lady only, who is to be let in at the top.” For these inventions he asked

the patronage of that Censor of Great Britain, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff,—and

therefore it must be true. However, how wide the time between the

blushes of Psyche and the era of hoops! Now it is something connected

with costume, during this interval, and subsequent to it, that I am now

about to speak. These words, between you and me, reader, have been as

the fragments of airs, which in musical introductions give us an inkling

of more fulness to come. I will only pause to add a sentiment from

Cowper;—but that would really be worse than Joseph Surface. No, reader! I

will fling in my sentiment at the end, and here invite you to consider a

subject, whose title heads the following page.

MAN, MANNERS, AND A STORY WITH A MORAL TO IT.

“Les hommes font les lois, les femmes font les mœurs.”—DE SÉGUE.

“L’homme est un animal!” said a French orator, by way of peroration to

his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies; “Man is an animal!”—and

there he stopped. He found his subject exhausted, and he sat down in

confusion. Thereupon his own familiar friend arose, and suggested that it

was desirable that the honourable gentleman’s speech should be printed,

_with a portrait of the author_!

The definition is, as far as it goes, a plagiarism from Plato. In the

Apophthegmata of Diogenes Laertius, it is stated that Plato defined

Man as an animal with two legs and without feathers. The definition

having been generally approved of, Diogenes went into the school of the

philosopher, carrying with him a cock, which he had stripped of his

plumage. “Here,” said he, “is Plato’s man!” Plato saw that his definition

needed improvement, and he added to it “with broad nails.” He might have

further said, “and needing something in place of feathers.”

So much depends upon this substitute, and so much more is thought of

habits than of manners,—that is, morals,—and of the makers of the former

than the teachers of the latter, that it is popularly and properly

said, “The tailor makes the man.” No doubt of it; and tailors are far

better paid than tutors. The Nugees keep country-houses and recline in

carriages; the philosophers are accounted of as _nugæ_, and plod on foot

to give golden instruction for small thanks and a few pence. _Their_

device, if they are ever so ennobled as to be thought worthy of one,

might be that of the patriotic ladies of Prussia, who, before the time

when their country became a satrapy of Muscovy, exchanged their golden

adornments for an iron ring, on which was engraved the legend, “_Ich gab

Gold um Eisen_,”—I gave gold for iron.

This being the case, it is little to be wondered at that man is more

careful about his dress than his instruction. The well-dressed man looks,

at all events, like a man well to do; and how profound is the respect of

the world for a man who may be catalogued as “_well to do_!” That man

thoroughly understood the meaning of the term who, when on his trial for

murder, and anticipating an acquittal, invited his counsel to dinner. The

invitation was accepted, but, the verdict rendering the inviter incapable

of even ordering a dinner for himself, the intended guest frowned on the

convict, and went and dined with the prosecutor.

Philosophy has done its best to cure man of vanity in dress; but

philosophy has been vain,—and so has man. “For a man to be fantastic and

effeminate in attire,” says Stobæus, “is unpardonable. It is next to

Sardanapalus’s spinning among women. To such I would say, Art thou not

ashamed, when Nature hath made thee a man, to make thyself a woman?”

Seneca hath something to the same purpose, and not altogether

inapplicable in our days. “Some of the manly sex amongst us,” says he,

“are so effeminate, that they would rather have the commonwealth out

of order, than their hair; they are more solicitous about trimming and

sprucing up their heads, than they are of their health or of the safety

of the public; and are more anxious to be fine than virtuous.” Sir Walter

Raleigh asserts that “No man is esteemed for gay garments, but by fools

and women,”—an assertion which shows that his philosophy and his civility

were both in a ragged condition. Sir Matthew Hale throws the blame where

it ought to be borne, when he declares that the vanity of loving fine

clothes and new fashions, and valuing _ourselves_ by them, is one of the

most childish pieces of folly that can be.

The philosophy of the judge is “truer steel” than that of the soldier.

But, for philosophy in describing a dress, I know nothing that can

surpass that of the poor Irishman, who, looking down at his own garment

of million tatters, smilingly said that it was “made of holes.”

There is very good philosophy in the story of Nessus and his tunic. We

all know how the story is told in history, and that it therefore cannot

be true. Apollodorus and Pausanias, Diodorus, Ovid, and Seneca, have all

told the same tale, without guessing at the truth which lies hid in it.

It is to this effect:—When Hercules was on his way to the court of Ceyx,

king of Trachinia, in company with his “lady,” Dejanira, the travellers

came to the swollen river of Evenus. Nessus, the centaur, politely

carried the lady over, and became very rude to her on the opposite bank.

The stalwart husband, from the other shore, observing what was going

on, sent one of his shafts, dipped in the poison of the Lernæan Hydra,

right into the centaur’s heart. Nessus, while dying, presented his

shirt,—that is, his tunic,—to Dejanira, informing her that if she could

persuade Hercules to wear it, he would never behave to her otherwise

than as a gentleman. Now, as he never had yet so comported himself—for

he was a dreadful bully—Dejanira accepted the gift; and, as the hero was

soon after found flirting with his old love Iole, and was vain of his

appearance, she sent the gay garment to him, and he had no sooner donned

it than death clasped him, and the hero was transferred to where there

were so many other powerful rascals,—the halls of Olympus. So much for

fiction, and those never-to-be-trusted poets. Here is the truth.

Nessus was a ridiculous old dandy, with a juvenile wig and reprobate

principles. He courted Hercules’ “lady,” and so flattered her that she

became fonder than ever of fashionable garments, and even accepted a

shawl from the centaur, who had ordered it in the name of the husband,

and left him to pay for it. Hercules forgot his vexation in the _beaux

yeux_ of Iole; and remembering how the “old beast,” as he used to

call the centaur, had contrived to sun himself in Dejanira’s eyes, he

adopted the fashion of Nessus; and, lightly as nymphs were dressed in

the days of Iole, he ran up a right royal bill at the milliner’s, and no

more thought of what he should have to pay than the Duke of York, when

ordering cashmeres for Anna Maria Clarke. The fall of the year however

came, and therewith the “little account,” with an intimation that a

speedy settlement would oblige. Hercules, hero as he was, felt his heart

fail him as he looked at “the tottle of the whole,” and he fell into such

extravagances that, being hunted to death by bailiffs, and his honesty

as small as that of the proprietor of an ultra-pietist paper who cheats

his editor, he took the benefit of the act, and retired to the country,

where he kept a shabby chariot, drawn by only two mangy leopards, and

ultimately died, like other heroes, bewailing his amiable weaknesses.

But let us go further back than to mythology, in order to examine the

origin of dress.

It may be said (and I hope without profanity) that sewing came in with

sin; or rather, it was one of the first consequences of the first crime.

Perhaps, for this reason, has a certain degree of contempt been inherited

by the professors of the art. The trade of a tailor is not honoured

with mention in any part of the Scriptures. Gardening was the early

occupation, and hence horticulture is accounted refined. Tubal Cain was

the first worker in iron; and from his time down to a very late period,

the employment which required much exercise of muscular strength had the

precedence of mere sedentary callings. The French, indeed, as becomes

a nation which prides itself as being the most particular touching the

external dressing of a man, has always confessed to a sort of tender

regard for the tailor. The vocation against which Gallic wits direct

their light-winged shafts, is that of the grocer. The _épicier_ with

them is a man whose soul does not rise above _lait de poule_ and cotton

nightcaps. He is generally the coward in farces, while heroism is not

made separable from the melancholy wielders of the needle.

In France however we may still trace a remnant of the time when the

highest honour was awarded to the pliers of the heaviest tools, or the

workmen whose vocation had a spice of peril in it. Thus the farrier

smith, in France, still enjoys a courtesy rank which places him on a

nominal equality with the tried commanders of valiant hosts; and if

Soult was Marshal of France, so every Gallic farrier is “_maréchal

ferrant_”—the marshal of the workers in iron.

As weavers and fullers are noticed in Holy Writ, while the tailor is

passed over in silence, it is probable that he had no distinct status

among the Jews, and that, during a long period at least, every man was

his own _costumier_. In other countries the tailor and the physician were

both slaves, and probably the first was as little or less of a bungler

than the second; for the _servus vestiarius_ could often improve the

outer man, when the _servus medicus_ could not do as much for the inner

one.

Under the old dispensation, sewing, as I have said, followed sin; and

he who forged a bill-hook or a brand was in higher esteem than he who

lived by the exercise of the needle. Under a later dispensation we find

examples of this order of precedency being reversed. Lydia of Thyatira

was among the first who joined Paul in prayer, by the riverside at

Philippi. Her office was to make up into garments the purple cloth for

which Lydia itself was famous. With this proselyte Paul dwelt, and on her

he left a blessing. It was not so with a certain strong handicraftsman.

When Paul was once at the point of death he bethought him of an old

vicious adversary, and said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil;

the Lord reward him according to his works!” And by this we not only

see that he who taught so wisely could sometimes err against his own

instructions, but we may even make this strange circumstance profitable

to us by viewing in it the proof that even the nearest to heaven are not

entirely free from the stains of earth; and that the spirit truly worthy

of immortality has never yet been found in aught that was mortal.

And this reminds me, that while every Jew learned some trade, there

is none recorded as having learned that of a tailor. The coppersmiths

endeavour to disconnect their calling from the excommunication of Paul,

by asserting that the Alexander who did evil to Paul, by maligning

him and by broaching heresies upon the resurrection, was really a

philosopher, who was only a coppersmith for his amusement. This however

is not likely, for it was not usual to designate learned men by the

name of their adopted trades. And however this may be, it was Lydia the

maker of purple vests who obtained the blessing, while Alexander the

coppersmith inherited the curse.

And may I here remark,—for I hope to be permitted to indulge in a good

deal of “cross stitch” in these unpretending sketches,—that the best of

men of modern times can, like St. Paul, be vigorously minded against

their opponents. I will only cite Cowper, who was more wrathful than the

Apostle, without the provocation by which the latter was judicially moved.

Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets. He is elevated

in his ‘Table Talk;’ acute in detailing the ‘Progress of Error;’ and he

chants the praises of ‘Truth’ in more dulcet notes than were ever sounded

by the fairest swan in Cayster. His ‘Expostulation’ is made in the tones

of a benevolent sage. His ‘Hope’ and his ‘Charity’ are proofs of his pure

Christian-like feeling;—a feeling which also pervades his ‘Conversation’

and his ‘Retirement,’ and which barbs the shafts of his satire without

taking away from their strength. The same praise is due to the six books

of the ‘Task,’ of which perhaps the _Garden_ is the least successful

portion. If however we be disposed to find fault at all with anything

in his sentiment or expression, it would be in this,—that while he

celebrates in warm praises the delights of his own peaceful and retired

life—a life which, on the respectable authority of the old medical

writer Celsus, I may call as hurtful to the body as it is profitable or

necessary to the mind (“Literarum disciplina, ut animo præcipue omnium

necessaria, sic corpori inimica est”), there is some illiberality in

his declaring that the various occupations of other and more active men

are either frivolous or criminal. Cowper patiently enjoys holding the

ravelled thread for ladies to wind it on to their bobbins, but he sneers

at the party who sits down to chess or stands up to billiards. He will

praise air and exercise, if you will only take them in company with

_him_, in covered walks where there is what he so well and quaintly calls

“An obsolete prolixity of shade.”

But if you enjoy your air and exercise in field sports, you are more

ignoble than your groom, and a greater brute than the victim you pursue.

Again: he acknowledges change of scene to be beneficial to the animal

economy; but he intends thereby a change from one parish to another.

You must not go to France for change, without being undeniably anything

but a gentleman and a Christian. He is ready too to eat game and dine

on venison, but he would not, for the world, be so guilty as to course

a hare or shoot a buck. Finally, he would listen with all imaginable

pleasure and rapture to the strains of Handel, were they only composed

to the glory and praise of Damon and Dolly, rather than, as they are, to

the eulogy of the Messiah and in illustration of His sacrifice.

But why, it may be asked, this piece of patchwork with Cowper’s name

thereon? Well, Cowper was something of a tailor in his way, and could

sew a button on his sleeve as adroitly, if not as any tailor in town, at

least as any sailor in the fleet. And in this he was something akin to

Pope Pius VII. when prisoner at Fontainebleau.

What a heavy captivity was that!—not so much for the prisoner, as for

those who were compelled to listen to the long and dreary and pointless

stories of the good-natured and weak old man. When the officers who

had this Pope in charge, were conducting him from Rome to Paris, they

on one occasion shut him up in a coach-house, where he remained seated

in his carriage, while his captors dined. Cardinal Pacca says of this

Pope, who was an admirable tailor when necessity pressed him, that,

during the eighteen months he was resident at Fontainebleau, he could

never be prevailed upon to quit his own suite of apartments. He, and the

Cardinals who accompanied him, were employed in conjugating the verb

_s’ennuyer_. He loved a little gossip, and hated books; but the captive

had a solace—one worthy of the dignity of Diocletian, when he cultivated

cabbages. Savary, Duke de Rovigo, who was chief gaoler over the chief

Pontiff, says, of the latter, that “he did not open a book the livelong

day; and he occupied himself in things which, if I had not myself seen,

I never should have believed; stitching and mending, for instance,

holes and rents in his clothes, sewing a button on his breeches, and

washing with his own hands his dressing-gown, on which he had a habit of

allowing his snuff to fall in large quantities.” Savary is especially,

and naturally, astonished that the supreme Pontiff preferred his amateur

tailoring to enjoying the books in the great library of Fontainebleau.

Poor man! he did not like reading, but he did like killing time at the

point of the needle. The tailors of his community are doubtless proud

of such a patron. The story rests on Savary’s authority; and while

Cardinal Pacca abuses him for telling it, his Eminence does not deny its

authenticity.

* * * * *

But we must not allow the Pope and his pursuits to take us away from the

consideration of sacred things. Reverting therefore to the Jews, it may

be said of them that if they did not possess the tailor as a professor,

they had a sufficient variety of dress to perplex the domestic ministers

of fashion. There is quite as much perplexity for those who have to

write about it. The Jews, like the modern children of the Prophet, would

not tolerate the representation of any living figure, and the antiquary

has therefore no chance of consulting a Hebrew ‘Journal des Modes.’

The monuments of nations distant from Palestine cannot be accepted as

authority when they are said to represent the Jewish people, for we have

no assurance that the people _are_ thereon represented; or if they be

Jews, that they are, in slavery, wearing a national costume.

Of one thing however there is a certainty. The Jews _had_ a national

costume; and, except in ceremonial dresses and some female appendages,

it had very little resemblance indeed to the costume of the Egyptians.

The material of Jewish garments was manufactured at home; the skilful

hands of the women spinning and weaving the raw material afforded by

the flocks. Not _all_ the women appear to have been given to the useful

work. There were some fine ladies among the multitude that came out

of Egypt, and these had an aristocratically foolish contempt for the

spinners and tailoresses of the tribes. But I would especially recommend

my fair readers to remember the sacred record, which ennobles labour,

where it says:—“All the women that were _wise-hearted_ did spin with

their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of

purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen;” and again it is said,—and

it sounds like God’s blessing upon the daughters of toil,—“And all the

women whose _hearts stirred them up in wisdom_ spun goats’ hair.” No

doubt these women, whose hearts were the thrones of wisdom, were primeval

tailoresses. And much value was set upon the habits which they made, the

shaping of which, I may add, presented little difficulty. The principal

article of dress was an ample woollen garment,—a cloak by day, and a

couch by night. It served two purposes, like Goldsmith’s stocking, which,

at night, he drew from his feet to place on his head. Much value, I have

said, was attached to this garment; as, for instance: “If thou at all

take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it to him by

that the sun goeth down. For that is his covering only; it is the raiment

for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? And it shall come to pass, when he

crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.”

At Beni Hassan, in Egypt, there are some painted representations of men

who are supposed to be the counterfeit presentment of Jews fresh from

their own country, and therefore in undoubted Jewish costume. The men

are variously attired: they are all sandalled. Some wear only short

tunics, others a cloak over the tunic. This cloak or plaid, for it is of

a striped and figured pattern, and is described as resembling the fine

grass-woven cloth of the South Sea, is worn over the left shoulder and

under the right arm, leaving the latter free for action. Other figures

are clad in fringed shirts, or tunics of the same material as the plaid,

reminding one of the command given unto Moses in the fifteenth chapter

of Numbers: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they

make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their

generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribbon of

blue.” And again, in Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the

four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself:” and it

will be remembered that a formal observance of this command gave ground

for censure, when the Jews were, at a later period, reproached because

“all their works they do for to be seen of men; they make broad their

phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.”

The garments in the paintings at Beni Hassan are of the very simplest

construction. The Hebrew maker of them could hardly have committed the

trifling mistake made by Andrew Fern, the weather-brained tailor of

Cromarty, who used, says Hugh Miller, “to do very odd things, especially

when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the

circumstance that Andrew fabricated for him his first jacket, and that

though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder,

where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the

other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes!” There are no pocket-holes

visible in the Jewish garments.

The Jews soon learned to enlarge their fringes. In the Valley of Bab el

Malook, near Thebes, Belzoni discovered a tomb in which is represented

the triumph of Pharaoh Necho, after the victory over the Jews at Megiddo.

The Jews, among the captives, look very much like Highlanders, with

nothing on but kilts kept down about the knees by leaded bunches of

ribbons,—a fashion not unknown to modern Ballerinas, who wear “very thin

clothing, and but little of it.” The captives, however, have probably

been stripped of their upper garments, which the conquerors may be

supposed to have sold to the tailors of Misraim, whereupon to model new

fashions for the modish dwellers by the purple Nile.

The Rabbins had some curious ideas touching the original form of Adam,

and the peculiar dress made for him and Eve before the Fall. Bartolozzi,

in his ‘Bibliotheca Rabbinica,’ notices the tradition that the father of

mankind was originally furnished with a tail, but that it was cut off

by his Maker, because he looked better without it. Another tradition

asserts that, before the fall, Adam and Eve had a transparent covering,

a robe of light, of which remnants are left to mankind in the nails of

the hands and feet. Let me add, for the sake of those who are fond of

adopting primeval colours, that the original hue of the father of man is

said to have been a bottle-green. When Stulz furnished Mr. Haynes with

his celebrated pea-green coat, the _schneider_ only made him as closely

resembling as he could to Eliezer the Tanaite, in his bright green

gabardine. And Eliezer if a good patron to tailors, and a wearer of gay

colours, was also one of the most learned of men. It is said of him, that

if all the firmament were changed into parchment, and the entire ocean

into ink, it would not suffice to write all that he knew; for he was the

author, among other brief works, of three hundred volumes, solely upon

the subject of sowing cucumbers. Perhaps Stulz wished to make the wooer

of Miss Foote look as like a philosopher as possible, for Eliezer was not

the only sage who walked the world in verdant suit. When Amelia Opie paid

her visit to Godwin in Somers’ Town, the teacher of the peoples wore over

a fiery crimson waistcoat a bottle-green coat, the colour of the original

man, from whom Godwin of course very much doubted whether he really

_were_ descended.

The Jews, as rather given to luxury in dress, would have been excellent

patrons of the tailors, but for Christian jealousy. In Spain and

Portugal, the rich Hebrews were the unqualified delight of the most

orthodox of tailors—who loved to dress even more than they did to burn

them. But the ultra-pietism of the Queen Regent at Valladolid, in the

year 1412,—a year when the prospects of the unfortunate descendants of

Israel were particularly gloomy,—put a clog upon trade, without, in any

degree, accelerating religion. The counsellor of the Queen was Brother

Vincent Ferrer, the inveterate enemy of the Jewish nation. The two

together fulminated a decree, in the name of the infant monarch, Don

John, which in substance declared that the Jews should live apart, and

exercise no trade or calling that was either respectable or profitable.

The tailors of Castile would not have been much troubled at this decree,

for their old customers had saved money enough to make the fortunes of

the entire trade, had it not been for one of the concluding clauses,

which did more injury to Christians than to Jews. By these clauses Jews

were forbidden to wear cloaks, and were restricted to long robes, of poor

materials, over their clothes. The Jewesses were ordered to wear common

mantles reaching to their feet, and with hoods to be worn over the head.

Disobedience to these clauses was to be visited by “the forfeiture of all

the clothes they may have on, to their under garments.” An additional

clause fixed against them the canon of a sumptuary law; and no tailor

dared to supply to a Jew a suit, the cloth of which cost upwards of

thirty maravedis. If the tailor offended against this decree, the Church

admonished him, but the law scourged the Jew. The first time a Hebrew

donned a suit worth more than the thirty maravedis, he forfeited the

suit, and was sent home in his shirt. For a second offence, he forfeited

his entire wardrobe; but Justice kept him warm by administering to him

a hundred lashes, vigorously applied by the hand of an executioner, who

imagined that the more blood he drew the better Heaven would be pleased.

For a third indulgence in forbidden finery the Jew was mulcted of all

he possessed; “but,” says the gracious Queen Regent, “it is my pleasure

that, if the Jews choose, they may make coats and cloaks of the clothes

which they now possess.” How lucky for Baron Rothschild that he is not

compelled, like his predecessors, to carry his cast-off clothes to his

tailor, and have one new coat made out of two old garments!

The Persian Jews were as ill-content at having their tailors’ bills

regulated by the Government as were those of the Peninsula. When the

Persian Caliphs, who would allow nobody to be well-dressed but the

faithful, closed the colleges at Babylon, and expelled the professors,

it is said that nobody wept for the latter so much as the handicraftsmen

who used to adorn their outward persons. Of these expelled professors, a

corsair captured at sea Rabbi Moses, his handsome wife, and their son,

Rabbi Hanoch. On their way to Cordova, some Tarquinian-like overtures

were made to the lady, who, walking up to her husband, inquired if those

drowned at sea would be resuscitated at the resurrection? The Rabbi

smiled, and answered with the text:—“The Lord said, I will bring again

from Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea.” Thereupon

the Hebrew Lucretia plunged into the waves, and her husband into a

reverie, in which the calmly-pleasant abounded.

The Jews of Cordova redeemed the other captives, and the first visit of

Rabbi _père_ was to a tailor, of whom he ordered an outfit of sackcloth.

The honest man was disgusted with his customer’s taste, and valued below

cost-price a philosopher who declared that his logic was always more

conclusive in sackcloth than in habits spun from finer webs. Attired in

his new suit, he entered the Jewish college, where a learned dispute

was being carried on with equal warmth and obtuseness. A few words

from the mean stranger had an effect like the sun upon a fog, and the

president quitting his chair, the man in sackcloth was voted into it by

acclamation. The tailor, who had followed out of curiosity, ran to the

captain of the corsair, and told him that his late captive was a rare

man, of whose value he had been ignorant; and therewith the captain

would fain have had the sale cancelled, but the Caliph of Cordova

would not listen to such a proposition. Hanoch, the son of Moses, was

even more fortunate than his sire, for he espoused a daughter of the

House of Peliag. Hanoch displayed such liberality on the occurrence of

this union, that for a long time the corporation of tailors, whom he

especially benefited on this occasion, were accustomed to name one son

in their respective families after so liberal a patron of the craft. The

two Jewish households on that day were long celebrated at the hearths

of those who made their dresses. The wedding feast was held at Zahara,

near the city, and not less than seven hundred Israelites rode thither in

costumes that would have dazzled the Incas. Ask a well-to-do Cordovese

tailor as to the state of his vocation, and, if he has not now forgotten

the once popular legend, he will answer, “It is almost as flourishing,

Sir, as in the days of Hanoch, whom our predecessors cursed as a Jew,

and blessed as a customer.” It was a neatly cut distinction, and fitted

exactly.

Deformity of principle, as well as deformity of person, may sometimes

be the mother of Fashion. Thus it is stated by an old French writer,

that “the use of great purfles and slit coates was introduced by wanton

women;” but he adds, with great unction, that the fashion of these

lemans had been adopted by the princesses and ladies of England; and

with them he trusts that it will long remain. The same author shows

how a fair lady, by following the fashion thus lightly set, became the

victim of Satan himself. It must be premised that the author’s daughters

had been very desirous of indulging in furred garments, and purfles,

and slashed coats; and as the father saved himself from a long bill at

the dressmaker’s by telling the following story, I calculate upon the

gratitude of all sires similarly beset, if the telling of it here, and by

them to their respective young ladies, should be followed by the desired

consequences,—which I do not at all anticipate.

A certain knight having lost his wife, and not being at all sure as to

the locality in which her spirit rested, applied to a devout hermit,

who picked up a living by revealing that sort of secret. In our own

days, the Rev. Mr. Godfrey professes to get at the same mystery by dint

of table-turning. Well; the reverend gentleman’s ancestor, the hermit,

thought upon the question by going to sleep over it; and when he awoke,

he informed the knight that he had been, in a vision, to the tribunal

of souls, and that he had there learned all about the lady in question.

He had seen St. Michael and Lucifer standing opposite each other, and

between them a pair of scales, in one of which was placed the lady’s

soul, with its select assortment of good deeds; and in the other, all

her evil actions. A fiend, with all her garments and jewellery in his

possession, was looking on. The beam of the balance had not yet made a

movement, when the impetuous St. Michael was about generously to claim

the soul thus weighed. Thereupon Lucifer urbanely remarked, that he would

take the liberty of informing his once-esteemed friend of a fact probably

unknown to him. “This woman,” said he, “had no less than ten gowns and

as many coats; and you know as well as I do, my good Michael, that half

the quantity would have sufficed for her requirements, and would not have

been contrary to the law of God.”

St. Michael looked rather offended at its being supposed that he knew

anything about women and their gear, and suggested that too much

intercourse with both had been the ruin of his ex-colleague.

“Fier comme un Archange!” was the commentary of the deboshed Lucifer,

who, according to some old fathers, tempted Eve in very excellent French.

However that may be, he added, “the value of one of this pretty wanton’s

superfluous gowns or coats would have clothed and kept forty poor men

through a whole winter: and the mere waste cloth from them would have

saved two or three from perishing. Touche-fille,” he said, addressing the

fiend who carried the finery, “throw those traps into the scale.” The

fiend obeyed, by casting them in where the lady’s bad actions lay; and

straightway down sank that scale, and upward flew the beam which bore

the soul and its ounce of virtues. This was done with such a jerk that

the soul itself fell into the outspread arms of Touche-fille, who made

off with his prey, without waiting for further award. Lucifer looked

inquiringly at St. Michael; but the latter observed, that though his

opponent’s aide-de-camp had been somewhat too hasty, he would not dispute

the case any further. “But what, may I ask, do you intend to do with her?”

“She shall have a new dress daily, and fancy herself ugly in all.”

“Umph!” said Michael, “you certainly are the most exquisite of torturers.”

“And Michael, despite his modesty, _does_ know what most vexes a woman!”

“Go to ⸺;” whither, the last person addressed had not time to say. He was

interrupted by Lucifer, who remarked:—

“I have business upon earth. My affairs at home are well cared for in my

absence by a regency.”

And so they parted; and the moral of the tale is, that luxury in dress

tends to lead to the Devil. And though it be lightly said, it is also

truly said. Let us look through the book of patterns, wherein we may

trace the varieties of costume, its fashion and its follies, and see how

what was irreproachable today becomes ridiculous tomorrow.

ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

PART I.

“L’habit est une partie intégrante de l’homme; il agit sur nos

sens, et détermine notre jugement.”—LA BRUYERE.

Our ancestors, in early days, had what may be called early ways. They

were in no respect superior to New Zealanders in a savage state.

Civilization has however copied some of their customs, and old ladies who

paint their cheeks and necks are not much further advanced than their

ancestors, who coloured themselves all over, and _that_ not out of vanity.

Strabo says that the people in the west of England shaved their chins,

but cherished mustachios, wore black garments, and carried a stick. This

description might serve for half the gentlemen who are to be seen in

Regent Street and Rotten Row during the “season.” But I suppose one _may_

take the liberty to doubt that the Cradocks of today really resemble so

closely as the description would seem to warrant, their progenitors the

Caradocs of other times, who “looked like furies,” says Strabo, “but were

in fact quiet and inoffensive people.”

The early Welsh bards, we are told, dressed in sky-blue; the modern bards

of the million are content to breakfast on it: the British astronomers

wore green, which was not indicative of what the colour might have stood

for,—a verdant knowledge of the science. When the Romans planted their

conquering eagles on our soil, the old British chieftains resisted them

and their fashions. Tacitus says that it was the sons of the chieftains

who first adopted the Roman mode; and no doubt the old gentlemen were

disgusted when they beheld their unpatriotic young heirs wandering about

without their _braccæ_, and sporting the tunic before whose presence

liberty and trousers had disappeared, but not for ever.

The Saxons brought in their own fashions, and some of these still

prevail; the smock-frock, for instance, is the old Saxon tunic without

the belt. Such a dress was never known in Ireland nor in Scotland: the

Saxons kept for whole centuries to a fixed fashion, as may be seen in

any illustrated work on costume. In this respect they were only less

tenacious than the Persians, whose garments passed from father to son

as long as they could hold together. It would be difficult, I fancy, to

persuade any modern young Anglo-Saxon to draw on the _scanc-beorg_, or

shank-coverers, of his respected and deceased “governor.” It is only

the mantles of our Peers that descend hereditarily upon the shoulders

of succeeding generations; and some of these mantles look dingy

enough to date their origin from the time when Henry III. established

Tothill-fields Fair, in order to spite the Londoners. The latter, it

will be remembered, were compelled to close their shops for an entire

fortnight during the holding of the fair in Westminster; and the man on

Tower Hill who wanted to furnish his outward or inward person with the

smallest article was compelled to resort for it to the neighbourhood of

the Abbey, or to do without till the fair was raised.

The taste of the Anglo-Saxons was rather of a splendid character, but

sometimes questionable. A lady with blue hair, for instance, could

not have been half so pleasant to look at as a lady with blue eyes;

though the custom of dyeing the hair blue was perhaps scarcely more

objectionable than that of the young ladies and gentlemen of Gaul, who

washed theirs in a chalky solution, in order to make it a more fiery red

than it had been rendered by nature. I may add that, of the tasteful

Anglo-Saxons, the nuns were the most especially tasteful; and the

gorgeous attire of the sisters, with other attractions, seems to have

stirred the very hearts of some of the most stony of prelates.

Many of the latter however were rigidly severe in their censures against

the luxurious dressing of lively Saxon nuns; but their objurgations take

very much the form of that delivered by Tartuffe when he handed his

kerchief to Dorine:—

“Couvrez ce sein que je ne sçaurais voir:

A de tels objets les yeux sont blessés,

Et cela fait venir de coupables pensées.”

Though it be necessary to consider climate and temperature in the matter

of dress, we have had weather, even in England, from the severity of

which no dress could protect the wearer. Thus, in the year 851, the

winter became so suddenly cold and inclement, and went on with such

increasing severity, that clothing afforded no warmth to the frame, and

the people were widely smitten by paralysis. They suffered excruciating

anguish in the limbs; generally the arms and hands were first seized

upon by the disease, and those limbs usually became altogether withered

and useless. The paralysis respected neither rank, age, nor sex; the

highest dignitaries of the Church did not escape, though, of course,

they miraculously recovered. The clothiers of the period appear to have

been as much puzzled to discover a material for useful wear that would

meet the contingency, as a modern tailor would find it difficult to

take measure of the pulpy, shapeless, boneless being which Professor

Whewell, in his ‘Plurality of Worlds,’ thinks may be existing in Jupiter.

And he has a right to think so; for, on our own earth, have we not had

animals whose bones were on the outside, and whose inward parts were

all of cartilage? They would have been pretty playthings for Jupiter’s

emphatically soft nymphs and unvertebrated swains!

If the nuns of the Anglo-Saxon times were given to gorgeousness, the

clergy were not at all uninclined to dandyism. Boniface himself denounced

those priests who wore broad studs and images of worms, as servants of

Antichrist. Garments so adorned are looked upon by the descendants of

this great Anglo-Saxon missionary as the undoubtedly original “M. B.

coats.”

The Danes introduced fashions that sadly perplexed the simple tailors of

all Anglia. The former, in the days of their paganism, were attired in

garments as black as the raven which soared on their national standard.

When they came to England they learned to surpass the Anglo-Saxons

themselves in the gaiety of their apparel and manners. They even took to

combing their hair once a day; became so effeminate as to wash weekly;

and changed their body-linen, if not as often as they might, still

more frequently than was their wont of old. “By these means,” says old

Wallingford, “they pleased the eyes of the women, and frequently seduced

the wives and daughters of the nobility.” Alas, that virtue should not be

proof against even a half-washed seducer!

One of the greatest of the North Sea chieftains derived his name from his

dress, and Ragner Lodbroch means Ralph Leatherbreeches. The Lethbridges

of Somersetshire are _said_ to be descendants from this worthy. They

might go further in search of an ancestor and fare worse. Lodbroch

delighted in blood and plunder; wine he drank by the quart; wealth he

acquired by “right of might;” he believed in little, and feared even

less. A family anxious to assert its nobility could hardly do better than

hold fast by such a hero. Many a genealogical tree springs from a less

illustrious root.

The submission with which England received laws of fashion from France

is seen in the circumstance that even before the Conquest the English

imported the “mode” from beyond Channel, and universally adopted it.

This was the case both in speech and dress. The Saxon tongue became as

mute at the court of Edward the Confessor as the Flemish language has

around the throne of Leopold of Belgium. The respectable sires however

of the period did not make themselves so “outlandish” in their garb as

did their sons; yet when William tumbled on the sands at Pevensey, half

the hostile array prepared to resist his coming, as well as those who

looked on and awaited the course of events, were familiar with his form

of speech and accustomed to his fashion of dress. The fact that when

William was agitated he invariably occupied himself in lacing and untying

his cloak, is at least as well worth knowing as that the great Coligny

under similar circumstances used to insert two or three toothpicks into

his mouth, and there champ them into pulp. Let us add, that the Normans

shaved close and washed thoroughly; and the dirty Saxons might have found

consolation in the circumstance that their throats were cut by cleanly

gentlemen.

They were a costly people however, those Normans; and they not only

ruined the Saxons, but themselves, by the extravagance of their dress,

and the ever-varying fashions to which they bore an alacrity of

allegiance. Some of our wealthiest men of Norman descent, or fancying

themselves to be so, adopt in these days a fashion common enough in the

period of the Norman Kings, wearing a plumed helm on parade for show, and

a “wide-awake” elsewhere for comfort. The Normans even took the venerated

smock-frock of the Saxons, and modifying it a little, and lining it with

fur for the winter, they wore it as a surcoat over their armour, and

called it by the name of _bliaus_. Any gentleman therefore who wears a

blouse and a wide-awake may fancy himself, if he please, as being attired

like a Norman knight. Well, in spite of the strength of his fancy and

the sameness of the articles in question, he will be as little like to

Norman cavalier “as I to Hercules.”

I have said that the Normans generally were remarkable for the splendour

and variety of their costume; I may add that some of the Saxons were in

no degree behind them. There is Becket, for instance, the champion of

the Saxons and advocate of the Commons. When that remarkably humble man

went on his famous progress to Paris, the rustics observed, as he rode

meekly along, that the king of England must be a marvellous personage

indeed, seeing that his Lord Chancellor looked more like a king on his

throne than a traveller in the saddle. He was as stately in dress at

home as abroad; and he never forgave King Henry for tearing from his

shoulders his splendid new scarlet mantle lined with fur, to fling it to

a shivering beggar at his side. Excellent practical lesson, it may be

observed. Well, it assuredly was all the practical charity ever evinced

by the king. And moreover it was inappropriate. We all laughed when the

angelic Irving subscribed his gold watch to some benevolent fund; and we

should feel no particular increase of respect for our Sovereign and the

Lord Primate if they were to stand at Temple Bar, and the former were

to distribute the wardrobe of the latter among the mendicants who pass

beneath that hideously ridiculous arch.

Foppery in dress was at its height in the reign of Henry III., when men

half-ruined themselves in order that they might dress in vestments of

the magnificent material called cloth of Baldekins, or of Baldeck, the

usually received term for Babylon. The rich Cyclas of this time were

also named from the locality where the material was manufactured,—a

custom common enough, as may be seen in the names Worsted, Blanket,

Cambric, Diaper (d’Yprès), Bayonet, and many others. The general love of

dress, and the wealth manifested by the grandeur of the latter, made

Innocent IV. to speak of England as a “garden of delights,” and a “truly

inexhaustible fountain of riches.” From this fountain his Holiness drank

many a draught; and they who were compelled to supply it wished it might

choke him. But Innocent made cheap compensation to England by conferring

on it the signal honour of adopting its old national “wide-awake,”

and after dyeing it red, conferring it on his Cardinals. The scarlet

wide-awake was first worn at the Council of Lyons, in 1245. The Cardinals

did not exhibit their accustomed vigilance when they permitted the

fashion of this covering to glide from that of the wide-awake into that

of the “broad-brim” of the Society of Friends. But perhaps it is because

of its present fashion that Mr. Bright, who loves Russia and hates the

press, has such respect for Rome and such welcome for her aggressions.

“Why do you not wear richer apparel?” once asked a familiar friend of

Edward I. “Because,” said the sensible king, “I cannot be more estimable

in fine than I am in simple clothing.” If the monarch had only shown as

much sense in other matters, he would have been a more profitable king

to the state, however little beneficial he may have been to tailors. It

was, of course, the fashion now to be rather simply dressed; but there

were occasional departures from the rule: such as when the young Prince

Edward was invested as a knight, on which occasion the Temple Gardens

were crowded with the young nobility, his “companions,” who assembled

there to receive a magnificent distribution of purple robes, fine linen

garments, and mantles woven with gold. The two latter were furnished by

the merchant-tailors; and these, no doubt, blessed the donor as heartily

as the trade would now do, were her Majesty to assemble the heirs and

younger sons of Peers, have them measured in public, and dressed at her

expense for the benefit of trade. There are many younger sons who would

be as rejoiced thereat as the tailors themselves.

Old Kit Marlowe, and doubtless from good authority, has graphically

described not only Edward the Second, but that fine gentleman, his

favourite Gaveston. Of the latter he says:—

“I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk;

He wears a short Italian hooded cloak

Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap

A jewel of more value than the crown.”

And of Edward, Mortimer is made to say:—

“When wert thou in the field with banner spread?

But once; and then thy soldiers march’d like players,

With garish robes, not armour; and thyself,

Bedaub’d with gold, rode laughing at the rest,

Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest,

Where women’s favours hung like labels down.”

If the Norman Kings up to the period of Edward I. had encouraged a costly

extravagance of dress, there was another Norman habit which had spread

among the people generally, and quite as much to their cost,—the wretched

habit of swearing. To that people might well be applied the assertion,

that they were covered with curses as with a garment. The Saxons were

astounded at the variety and intensity of these oaths. They had not been

accustomed to such profanity; but as the conquerors, and particularly

the kings, swore whenever they spoke, why to use oaths was to put on the

air of a conqueror and gentleman, and so a species of Norman pride kept

oaths in vigour among the _élite_ of society until a very recent period;

but, as Mr. Robert Acres remarks, “the best terms will grow obsolete, and

Damns have had their day.” How we progressed through execratory terms

until this consummation was arrived at, is very tersely told in an old

epigram of Sir John Harrington’s:—

“In elder times an ancient custom was

To swear, in weighty matters, by the mass;

But when the mass went down, as old men note,

They swore then by the cross of this same groat.

And when the cross was likewise held in scorn,

Then by their faith the common oath was sworn;

Last, having sworn away all faith and troth,

Only ‘G—d damn them’ is their common oath.

Thus custom kept decorum by gradation,

That losing mass, cross, faith, they find damnation.”

Henry I. was surrounded by a crowd of friends, whose dresses were

splendid and whose principles were detestable,—not to say “devilish.”

These were the “Effeminati.” They were like the “mignons” of the French

King Henri, and acquired their appellation from the fact of dressing

nearly after the fashion of women. Their tunics were deep-sleeved, and

their mantles long-trained. The peaks of their shoes were not only

enormously long, but twisted so as to represent the horns of a ram or the

coils of a serpent. Their peaks, introduced by Fulk, Earl of Anjou, to

conceal his misshapen feet, were stuffed with tow; and certainly, were

any earl or other gentleman now to enter a drawing-room thus remarkably

shod, he would himself be taken in tow (if I may be so bold as to say

so), and conveyed before a tribunal _de lunatico inquirendo_. The

Effeminati, like the French “mignons,” wore their hair long, smooth, and

parted in the middle; and they were not only unpleasantly unnatural to

look at, but were horribly so in their deeds.

The foreign knights and visitors who came to Windsor in Edward the

First’s reign, and brought with them a continual succession of varying

fashions, turned the heads of the young with delight, and of the old with

disgust. Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, is especially denunciative

and satirical on this point. He says that in the horrible variety of

costume,—“now long, now large, now wide, now straight,”—the style of

dress was “destitute and devert from all honesty of old arraye or good

usage.” It is all, he says, “so nagged and knibbed on every side, and all

so shattered and also buttoned, that I with truth shall say, they seem

more like to tormentors or devils in their clothing, and also in their

shoying and other array, than they seemed to be like men.” And the old

monk had good foundation for his complaint; and the Commons themselves

having, what the Commons now have not, a dread of becoming as extravagant

as their betters in the article of dress, actually sought the aid of

Parliament. That august assembly met the complaint by restricting the

use of furs and furls to the royal family and nobles worth one thousand

_per annum_. Knights and ladies worth four hundred marks yearly, were

permitted to deck themselves in cloths of gold and silver, and to wear

certain jewellery. Poor knights, squires, and damsels were prohibited

from appearing in the costume of those of higher degree. As for the

Commons themselves, they could put on nothing better than unadorned

woollen cloth; and if an apprentice or a milliner had been bold enough

to wear a ring on the finger, it was in peril of a decree that it should

be taken off,—not the finger, but the ring,—with confiscation of the

forbidden finery.

The consequence was that the Commons, being under prohibition to put on

finery, became smitten with a strong desire to assume it; and much did

they rejoice when they were ruled over by so consummate a fop as Richard

of Bordeaux. All classes were content to do what many classes joyfully do

in our own days,—dress beyond their means; and we find in old Harding’s

‘Chronicle’ that not only were

“Yemen and gromes in cloth of silk arrayed,

Sattin and damask, in doublettes and in gownnes,”

but that all this, as well as habits of “cloth of greene and

scarleteen,—cut work and brodwar, was all,” as the Chronicler expresses

it, “for unpayed;” that is, was _not paid for_. So that very many among

us do not so much despise the wisdom afforded us by the example of our

ancestors as didactic poets and commonplace honest writers falsely

allege them to do. And those ancestors of Richard the Second’s time were

especially given to glorify themselves in parti-coloured garments of

white and red, such being the colours of the King’s livery (as blue and

white were those of John of Gaunt); and they who wore these garments,

sometimes of half-a-dozen colours in each, why they looked, says an old

writer, “as though the fire of St. Anthony, or some such mischance,” had

cankered and eaten into half their bodies. The long-toed shoes, held up

to the knee by a chain and hook, were called _crackowes_, the fashion

thereof coming from Cracow in Poland. The not less significant name of

“devil’s receptacles” were given to the wide sleeves of this reign, for

the reason, as the Monk of Evesham tells us, that whatever was stolen was

thrust into them.

The fashion of clothes has long ceased to mark the position of the

wearer. On this subject, Fuller says in his ‘Church History,’ when

treating of the time of Edward III., that “some had a project that

men’s clothes might be their signs to show their birth, degree, or

estate, so that the quality of an unknown person might, at the first

sight, be expounded by his apparel. But this was at once let fall as

impossible: statesmen in all ages, notwithstanding their several laws to

the contrary, being fain to connive at men’s riot in this kind, which

maintaineth more poor people than their charity.”

Distinction in dress, it will be remembered, was not allowed by More in

his Utopia. “All the island over,” he says, “they make their own clothes,

without any other distinction than that which is necessary for marking

the difference between the two sexes, and the married and unmarried.

The fashion never alters; and as it is not ungrateful nor uneasy, so it

is fitted for their climate, and calculated both for their summers and

winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women

as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned.” A

costume suitable for all conditions of the seasons, were a consummation

that will long be among the things to be devoutly wished for, and never

attained.

It was once the fashion to wear coats, the material for which had not

long before been on the back of the sheep. For rapidity of work in this

way, I know nothing that can compete with the achievement of Coxeter of

Greenham Mills, near Newbury. He had a couple of South Down sheep shorn

at his factory, at five o’clock in the morning; the wool thus produced

was put through the usual processes; and by a quarter past six in the

evening, it resulted in a complete damson-coloured coat, which was worn

at an evening party, by Sir John Throckmorton. A wager for a thousand

guineas was won by this feat, with three-quarters of an hour to spare.

The sheep were roasted whole, and devoured at a splendid banquet. In one

day they afforded comfort to both the inner and outward man.

We have often been told, that “Beauty, when unadorned, is adorned the

most;” and there is much truth in that wholesome apothegm. Beauty

indeed needs to be dressed; but Prudence should be her handmaiden. In

illustration of the excellence of this counsel, I may quote what happened

to two young ladies and one lover in the days of chivalry.

In those days there lived an old noble, rich in two daughters, and in

nought besides. Of these, he promised one to a young knight, who was

wealthy and idle, and who—strange characteristic of young and gallant

knight!—was well content to be saved the trouble of wooing.

On a certain fine morning the sire made the same announcement to his

girls which the father of Dinah made to that now celebrated and unhappy

young lady,—namely, the necessity of decking themselves in their most

seductive array, as there was a lover on the road who would dine with

them that day. Now, if the morning was fine, there was also an eager and

a nipping air abroad; but the elder of the two damsels, disregarding the

temperature, and thinking only how best to display her slender waist

and graceful shape, put on a “cote hardie;” and in this close-fitting

garment, without an inch of fur to lend it warmth, she accompanied her

sister to the portal, to bid welcome to the lover, looking for a lady of

his love. But that sister was attired with reference to the condition of

the thermometer, if her father had one, which is exceedingly doubtful.

She was warmly clad; and if her figure was concealed by her mantle, the

result of such covering was, that her young blood, in circulating, left a

rose upon her cheeks, and did not fix itself, in obstinate stagnation, as

in her more airy sister’s case, on the tip of the nose.

Now a red nose is not fascinating; and the knight’s choice was soon

made. He gave his hand to the maiden who had shown most sense in the

choice of attire, and a very merry wedding was the speedy consequence.

As for what turned up in the way of further results, it was, I believe,

chiefly the nose of the unsuccessful candidate, which became “retroussé

en permanence”. The moral of the tale is respectfully recommended to the

notice of all young ladies who seek to catch ardent knights on wintry

mornings.

If the men in the days of Edward III. wore “tails behind,” as well as

beards before, the ladies were not behind them in extravagance—in tails;

and indeed in other matters. For a lady to ride on a palfrey, and not on

a charger, would have been considered as derogatory as for a bridesmaid,

in our days, to “spoil her prospects” by going to a wedding in a

one-horse fly. The damsels of this age very much affected the dress of

the men, and we have seen the same affectation in our own time; and this

fashion was pushed to such an extreme, that they even carried two tiny

daggers in the pouches of their embroidered zones. Their head-dress still

lingers among the female peasantry of Normandy, and may be recognized in

the species of mitre cap, of enormous height, from the summit of which

streamers float in the air like pennants from the masts of some “tall

amiral.” It may be added, that if, in many respects, the dresses of the

women resembled those of the men, their deeds, too, were like theirs; and

these were often (like the dresses) none of the cleanest.

We will discuss the progress of these matters in a new chapter.

ADONIS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

PART II.

“La modestie, la plus touchante des vertus, est encore la plus

séduisante des parures.”—MAD. COTTIN: _Mathilde_.

The Jews were undoubtedly an ill-fated people. In London, in the

olden time, whenever any class had a grievance, the work of redress

was commenced by slaying the Hebrews. In the reign of Henry III. the

municipality of London and a portion of the nobility were dreadfully

incensed against Queen Eleanor; and to show their indignation, they not

only plundered and murdered scores of common Israelites, but the City

Marshal and Baron Fitz-John repaired to the residence of Kok ben Abraham,

the wealthiest Hebrew in the city, where the noble lord ran his sword

through the body of the child of the synagogue, laughing the while as if

the jest were a good one. Certainly, this was a strange method of showing

a political bias; and it would be no jest now if Lord Winchelsea, for

instance, angry at the desire of the Crown to admit Jews into Parliament,

were to rush down to the city and plunge his paper-cutter into the

diaphragm of poor Baron Rothschild.

In the case above alluded to, not only were some four hundred of the

devoted race robbed and killed, but the mob, satiated with savagery,

determined to wind up their well-spent evening with a frolic. Accordingly

they turned out of their beds all the Jews, of various ages and both

sexes, and compelled them to walk the streets throughout the entire

night, with nothing on but their “bed-gowns.” This was scant dress

enough in those times, and there was no active police to afford the

victims protection. I notice this incident, because it comes fairly

under the head of costume. I think, moreover, that all the police in

the city at the present time would be puzzled what to do, were the

last night of an election, returning “Sir Solomon” at the head of the

poll, to be signalled out by a riot, the climax of which presented all

the Levys, Goldschmidts, Isaacs, and Marx, of “Simmery Axe,”—wives and

husbands, sons and daughters,—compulsorily parading through Cheapside

in their night-gear. Between the blushes of Miss Tryphena Levy, and

the indignation of Mr. Penuel Isaacs her admirer, the gallant and

loud-laughing Division X. would hardly know which victim to succour

first. Such a _cortège_ however would probably bring into fashion the

“_bonnets de nuit à la Juive_.”

Our gallant knights of old thought it no degradation to receive clothes

at the hands of the king. When Henry IV. dubbed some four dozen the day

before his coronation, he made presents to all of long green coats, with

tight sleeves, furred, and verdant hoods: the cavaliers must have looked

like cucumbers. The sumptuary laws of this reign had this additional

severity in them, that they decreed imprisonment during the King’s

pleasure against any tailor who should dare to make for a commoner a

costume above his degree. The tailors, like wise men, did not ask their

customers whether they were gentle or simple; and burghers dressed as

before, more splendidly than barons.

There was this difference between the two wretched monarchs, John and

Richard III. John was curious about his wife’s dress, and careless

touching his own; whereas Richard (who was not half so bad as history and

Mr. C. Kean represent him) was perhaps the most superbly royal dandy that

ever sat on an English throne: George IV. was the mere _Dandini_ to that

_Prince Ramiro_. Henry VII., again, was utterly void of taste, and seems

to have wanted a nurse more than a valet.

The author of the ‘Boke of Kervynge’ says to the “proper officer” of

this king, in a sort of advice to servants, “Warme your soveregne his

petticotte, his doublet, and his stomacher, and then put on hys hozen,

and then hys schose or slyppers; then stryten up hys hozen mannerly, tye

them up, and lace his doublet hole by hole.”

We have an illustration of the national feeling with regard to dress in

Henry VIII.’s time, in the story of Drake, the cordwainer.

John Drake, the Norwich shoemaker, was resolved to dress, for once, like

a knight; and accordingly he betook himself to Sir Philip Calthrop’s

tailor, and seeing some fine French tawney cloth lying there, which the

cavalier had sent to have made into a gown,—gentlemen then, as now,

it seems, sometimes found “their own materials,”—the aspiring Crispin

ordered a gown of the same stuff and fashion. The knight, on calling

at the tailor’s, saw the two parcels of “materials,” and inquired as

to the proprietary of the second. “The stuff,” said the master, “is

John Drake’s, the Norwich shoemaker, who _will_ have a gown of the same

fashion as your valiant worship.” “Will he so?” asked proud Sir Philip;

“then fashion mine as full of cuts as thy shears can make it, and let

the two be alike, as ordered.” He was obeyed; but when John Drake looked

wonderingly upon his aristocratic garment, and saw the peculiar mode

thereof, and was moreover told the reason there_for_, he rubbed his

bullet-head vexedly, and remarked, “By my latchet, an it be so John Drake

will never ask for gentleman’s fashion again.”

I have spoken in my ‘Table Traits’ of how a French knight gained a

livelihood by making salads; I may notice here that a Flemish frau,

Dingham van der Plafze, did the same by starching ruffs in London,

in Queen Elizabeth’s time. She gave lessons to the nobility at four

or five pounds the course for each pupil, and an additional pound for

showing them how to make the starch. The nobility of course patronized

her; being a foreigner, the duchesses accounted her “divine.” People

of the commonalty, with as much wisdom, esteemed her as a devil; and

starch itself was looked upon as a sort of devil’s broth. The women who

wore ruffs were looked upon as anything but respectable; and the men

who placed around the neck the “monstrous ruff, of twelve, yea sixteen,

lengths apiece, set three or four times double,” were accounted of as

having made “three steps and a half to the gallows.”

James I., and his subjects who wished to clothe themselves loyally,

wore stupendous breeches. Of course the “honourable gentlemen” of the

House of Commons were necessarily followers of the fashion. But it led

to inconveniences in the course of their senatorial duties. It was an

old mode revived; and at an earlier day, when these nether garments were

ample enough to have covered the lower man of Boanerges, the comfort of

the popular representatives was thus cared for:—“Over the seats in the

parliament-house, there were certain holes, some two inches square, in

the walls, in which were placed posts to uphold a scaffold round about

the house within, for them to sit upon who used the wearing of great

breeches stuffed with hair like wool-sacks, which fashion being left the

eighth year of Elizabeth, the scaffolds were taken down, and never since

put up.” So says Strutt; but doubtless the comforts of the members were

not less cared for when the old fashion again prevailed. The honourable

gentlemen must have looked as if they were worshipping Cloacina rather

than propitiating the god of Eloquence.

“When Sir Peter Wych,” says Bulwer, in his ‘Pedigree of an English

Gallant,’ “was sent ambassador to the Grand Seigneur, from James I.,

his lady accompanied him to Constantinople, and the Sultaness having

heard much of her, desired to see her; whereupon Lady Wych, attended by

her waiting-women, all of them dressed in their great vardingales, which

was the court dress of the English ladies of that time, waited upon her

highness. The Sultaness received her visitors with great respect; but,

struck with the extraordinary extension of the hips of the whole party,

seriously inquired if that shape was peculiar to the natural formation of

Englishwomen; and Lady Wych was obliged to explain the whole mystery of

the dress, in order to convince her that she and her companions were not

really so deformed as they appeared to be.” Lady Wych probably did not

look more astounding to the Turks than the Marchioness of Londonderry did

to those of some thirty years ago, when she traversed the courts of the

Sultan’s palace in the full undress of a lady of the “Regent’s Drawing

Room.” Both these ladies were ambassadresses, and they remind me of the

English nobleman in the reign of Anne, who was informed that he had been

appointed representative of his sovereign at the court of the Sultan.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, “I can never undertake it, I should look so absurd

and awkward in women’s clothes!” He seriously thought that to represent

his mistress he must be dressed as she was! But I shall say more of Anne

hereafter. I have here to exhibit Oliver; Charles, as we all know, was a

gentleman, at all events in dress. In _that_ respect Cromwell differed

from him.

“The first time that I ever took notice of Oliver Cromwell,” says Sir

Philip Warwick, “was in the beginning of the Parliament held in November,

1640, when I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman, for we

courtiers valued ourselves much upon our good clothes. I came one morning

into the house well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I

knew not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit

which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His linen was

plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon

his little band, which was not much larger than his collar. His hat was

without a hatband; his stature was of good size; his sword stuck close to

his side.” Altogether it is clear that Oliver was a trifle slovenly, and

sometimes unsteady enough of hand to cut himself when shaving.

About the year 1660-1, we find our old friend Mr. Pepys gradually soaring

in the sky of fashion. He had been content with camlet, then he gets him

a suit of cloth with broad skirts, and adds the unheard-of atrocity of

rakish buckles to his shoes. Subsequently he enshrines his little person

in silk; ultimately rises to the dignity of a velvet coat; and on a

“Lord’s Day,” in February, he writes down that “this day I first began to

go forth in my coate and sword, as the manner now among gentlemen is.”

“Among gentlemen!” quotha; and his sire the tailor was yet alive, and his

cousin Tom Pepys was an honest turner, and sold mousetraps!

A velvet coat was not for every-day wear by a clerk in the Admiralty, and

Pepys had his by him a full half-year before he had the heart to surprise

the world and gratify himself by the wearing of it. Nor could Peers walk

every day in velvet and embroidery in Coleman-street, seeing that the

cost of a suit was not under £200. They were content to go occasionally

like the King at the Council Board—in a plain common riding-suit and a

velvet cap;—not half so fine as the livery of Pepys’s own boy, “which is

very handsome, and I do think to keep the black and gold lace upon grey,

being _the colour of my arms_, for ever.” The “colour of _his arms_!”

This reminds me of the rejoinder of Russell, the porter at the old

Piazza, who, on being asked if his coat-of-arms was the same as that of

the Duke of Bedford, replied that as for their arms they might be pretty

well alike, but that there was a deal of difference between their coats!

Pepys was however as proud as a popinjay, as the manner then among

gentlemen was; and his man Will imitated his master. _Tel maître, tel

valet._ See what he says of an occurrence which he notices on “Lord’s

Day,” June 8, 1662. “Home, and observe my man Will to walk with his

cloak flung over his shoulder, which, whether it was that he might not

be seen to walk along with the footboy, I knew not, but I was vexed at

it; and coming home, and _after prayers_, I did ask him where he learned

that immodest garb; and he answered me that it was not immodest, or some

such slight answer, at which I did give him two boxes on the eares,

which I never did before.” But the transgressor forgot his fault, in his

gratification a few Sundays after in going to church with his wife,—“who

this day put on her green petticoate of flowred sattin, with the white

and black gimp lace of her own putting on, which is very pretty.” I fear

that our ancestors thought as much upon matters of dress at church as

any of their descendants. To what an extent this feeling was carried may

be seen in the case of Pepys, who, seeing Captain Holmes in his pew in a

new gold-laced suit, was so chagrined that a disquisition upon damnation

failed to put him into spirits. The feelings of both husband and wife

were very sensitive touching costume; for does he not tell us, on one

occasion, that on a certain visit being paid them, they “were ashamed

that she should be seen in a taffeta gown when all the world wears moyre”?

The gentleman’s eyes indeed had just been regaled by a sight of the

“Russian Embassador,”—“in the richest suit for pearl and tissue that ever

I did see.” The envoy appears to have been an exceedingly well-dressed

barbarian; and the Muscovite officials of our own day are in no respect

behind him. Felony and mendacity would seem to be accounted of as

_péchés mignons_ by those gentlemen who wear polished boots and profess

honest principles, with coats like Count d’Orsay’s, and hearts beneath

them like Jack Sheppard’s. After all, the pearl and tissue of the Russ

was not half so tasteful as Lord Sandwich’s “gold-buttoned suit, as the

mode is;” and Pepys took to the fashion, buying fine clothes, and half

afraid to wear them, yet rejoicing that he is not now “for want of them,

forced to sneak like a beggar.” A camlet suit for common wear then cost

him four-and-twenty pounds! But Pepys had fits of extravagance as well as

economy. The former however were generally born of patriotism: witness

his buying “a coloured silk ferrandin suit, for joy of the good news we

have lately had of our victory over the Dutch.”

About the time above specified, the Court of Spain was remarkable for

its gravity of dress. The king and grandees wore simple mantles of

Colchester baize; and in winter, the mantles of the señoras were of no

more costly material than white flannel. Thereupon English and Dutch

handicraftsmen repaired to Madrid, in order to establish a manufactory

of these articles. The men engaged were sober, religious men; and they

had with them Psalters and Testaments, and they were given to be glad in

spiritual songs, and to solace their weariness with a refreshing draught

from the Gospels. Thereupon the Inquisition fell upon them, destroyed

their houses, and imprisoned the workmen. Had these been Atheists, the

“Holy Office” would not have molested them in their manufactory of

baizes and flannels; but as they dared to worship God in sincerity of

heart and independence of mind, the Cahills and Wisemans of the pure and

enlightened Peninsula ruined them in bodily estate, and sent their souls

to Gehenna.

Louis XIV. was quite as arbitrary and absurd on a matter of fashion.

Charles II. of England was the inventor of the “vest dress.” It consisted

of a long cassock which fitted close to the body, of black cloth,

“pinked” with white silk under it, and a coat over all; the legs were

ruffled with black ribbon, like a pigeon’s leg; and the white silk

piercing the black made the wearers look, as Charles himself confessed,

very much like magpies. But all the world put it on, because it had been

fashioned by a monarch; and gay men thought it exquisite, and grave men

pronounced it “comely and manly.” Charles declared he would never alter

it, while his courtiers “gave him gold by way of wagers, that he would

not persist in his resolution.” Louis XIV. showed his contempt for the

new mode and the maker of it, by ordering all his footmen to be put into

vests. This caused great indignation in England, but it had a marked

effect in another way: for Charles and our aristocracy, not caring to

look like French footmen, soon abandoned the new costume.

This reminds me of a foolish interference of Louis XVI. in a matter of

dress. In the days of our grandfathers there was nothing so fashionable

for summer wear as nankeen. No gentleman would be seen abroad or at home

in a dress of which this material did not go to the making of a portion;

and as we ever fixed the fashion on questions of male costume, the mode

was adopted in France, and English nankeens threatened to drive all

French manufactured articles of summer wear out of the market. The king

however surmounted the difficulty: he ordered all the executioners and

their assistants to perform their terrible office in no other dress but

one of nankeen. This rendered the material “infamous;” and many a man

who deserved to be hanged, discarded the suit because a similar one was

worn by the man who did the hanging. So Mrs. Turner, the poisoner, being

executed in the reign of James I. in a yellow starched ruff, put to death

the fashion of wearing them.

Picturesqueness of costume went out with chivalry; and few things could

be uglier than an Englishman of James the Second’s or of William and

Mary’s days, except an Englishman of our own tight and buttoned period.

A hundred years ago it would have been unsafe to have sold a plaid

waistcoat in either Rag Fair or Houndsditch. In 1752 Mr. Thornton said

in the House of Commons, that “he believed it true, plaid waistcoats had

been worn by some wrong heads in the country; but in the parts where he

lived he saw no occasion for an army to correct them” (he was speaking

against a standing army), “for some that had attempted to wear them had

been heartily thrashed for doing so.” In the same year it is worthy of

remark that we were exporting gold and silver bullion to the Continent;

not indeed at the rate at which we are now importing it, especially

the former, but still in quantities that seem almost incredible. The

metal-import question as it stood then excites a smile in those who

read it now. For example, among the current news given by our juvenile

friend, Sylvanus Urban, in his volume for 1752, we learn that “a parcel

of waistcoats embroidered with foreign gold and silver (which were lately

seized at a tailor’s house, who must pay the penalty of £100, pursuant to

Act of Parliament), were publicly burnt in presence of the custom-house

officers and others.”

The steeple head-dresses of Anne and the first George’s days came under

the notice of Addison, in the ‘Spectator.’ He compares them with the

_commodes_, or _towers_, of his time. Speaking of the former, he tells

us that the women would have carried their head-structures much higher

had it not been for the preaching of a monk named Concete. The good and

zealous man preached with more effect than Rowland Hill did, when he

inveighed from the pulpit against Mrs. Hill’s top-knots. So logically

did he prove that steeple head-dresses were devices of the devil, that

they who wore them were the devil’s daughters, and that after this life

the everlasting home of the latter would be with their father, that

the ladies, in a fit of religious enthusiasm, cast off the denounced

decorations during the summer, and made a bonfire of them after it was

over. It must have been a pretty fire in which pride was burned, for the

congregation amounted to something like ten thousand women, with as many

male hearers; from which it is to be supposed that the preaching took

place in the open air. If only half the ladies committed their caps to

the flames, it was, no doubt, a glad sight to the makers of the caps.

_They_ were sure that if fashion went out in one blaze, it would rise

phœnix-like from the flames of that fire or another. For a time however,

these exaggerated head-dresses were excommunicated; and it was as unsafe

for a lady to appear in one in public, as it would be for a lady to make

a tour through the liberty of Dublin on the 12th of July, clad entirely

in materials of Orange hue, and singing at the top of her voice the

exasperating song of ‘Boyne Water.’ She would assuredly be pelted, as

_they_ were pelted by the religious and unfashionable rabble, who, years

ago, if they could tolerate sin, were shocked at the sight of tall gay

caps, which had been denounced by a short grave friar. But the milliners

had not long to wait unemployed. As soon as the monk had turned his

back, the needlewomen were again set to work; and “countless ’prentices

expired” in the efforts made to execute the orders. “The women,” says

Monsieur Paradin, “who had, like snails in a fright, drawn in their

horns, shot them out again as soon as the danger was over.”

When Walpole had been to King George the Second’s Levee and Drawing-room,

in 1742, he wrote of what he witnessed in this lively fashion:—“There

were so many new faces that I scarce knew where I was; I should have

taken it for Carleton House, or my Lady Mayoress’s visiting day, only

the people did not seem enough at home, but rather as admitted to see

the King dine in public. ’Tis quite ridiculous to see the numbers of old

ladies, who, from having been wives of patriots, have not been dressed

these twenty years; out they come, in all the accoutrements that were in

use in Queen Anne’s days. Then the joy and awkward jollity of them is

inexpressible. They titter, and wherever you meet them, they are always

going to court, and looking at their watches an hour before the time. I

met several on the birthday (for I did not arrive time enough to make

clothes), and they were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow: they

seem to have said to themselves twenty years ago, ‘Well, if ever I do go

to court again, I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver;’ and

they keep their resolution.”

Walpole is quite right in designating the gaiety of the women as an

awkward jollity. Rough enjoyment was a fashion at this time with the

fair. Mrs. Sherwood, in her pleasant Autobiography, adverts to this

subject in speaking of her mother’s early days, when undignified

amusements were not declined by ladies of any age. One of these she

describes as consisting of the following sort of violent fun. A large

strong table-cloth was spread on the upper steps of the staircase, and

upon this cloth the ladies inclined to the frolic seated themselves in

rows upon the steps. Then the gentlemen, or the _men_, took hold of the

lower end of the cloth, attempting to pull it downstairs; the ladies

resisted this with all their might, and the greater the number of these

delicate creatures the longer the struggle was protracted. The contest,

however, invariably ended by the cloth and the ladies being pulled down

to the bottom of the stairs, when everything was found bruised, except

modesty. ‘High Life below Stairs’ could hardly have been too rampant in

its exposition, if it really reflected what was going on above. We can

hardly realize the matter. We hardly do so in merely fancying we see good

Lord Shaftesbury Admiral Gambier, Baptist Noel, and Dr. M’Neil engaged

in settling Miss Martineau, Catherine Sinclair, the “Authoress of Amy

Herbert,” and Mrs. Fry on a table-cloth upon the stairs, and hauling them

down in a heap to the bottom. It would be highly indecorous; but, I am

almost ashamed to say, I should like to see it.

In 1748 George II. happened to see that gallant French equestrian, the

Duchess of Bedford, on horseback, in a riding-habit of blue turned up

with white. At that time there was a discussion on foot, touching a

general uniform for the navy: the appearance of the Duchess settled the

question. George II. was so delighted with her Grace’s appearance, that

he commanded the adoption of those colours; and that accounts perhaps

for the fact, that sailors on a spree are ever given to getting upon

horseback, where they do not at all look like the Duchess whose colours

they wear.

Taste was undoubtedly terribly perverted in this century. Some ladies

took their footmen with them into their box at the play; others married

actors, and their noble fathers declared they would have more willingly

pardoned their daughters had they married lacqueys rather than players.

A daughter of the Earl of Abingdon married Gallini the ballet-master,

of whom George III. made a “Sir John”; and Lady Harriet Wentworth did

actually commit the madness of marrying her footman,—a madness that had

much method in it. This lady, the daughter of Lord Rockingham, transacted

this matter in the most business-like way imaginable. She settled a

hundred a year for life on her husband, but directed her whole fortune

besides to pass to her children, should she have any; otherwise, to her

own family. She moreover “provided for a separation, and ensured the

same pin-money to Damon, in case they part.” She gave away all her fine

clothes, and surrendered her titles: “linen and gowns,” she said, “were

properest for a footman’s wife;” and she went to her husband’s family in

Ireland as plain Mrs. Henrietta Sturgeon.

It is characteristic of the manners of this period, that Lady Harriet

Wentworth, in marrying her footman, was not considered as having so

terribly _dérogé_ as Lady Susan Fox, Lord Ilchester’s daughter, who in

the same year, 1764, married O’Brien the actor, a man well to do, and

who owned a villa at Dunstable. The actor had contrived something of

the spirit of farce in carrying out his plot. He succeeded so well in

imitating the handwriting of Lady Susan’s dearest friend, Lady Sarah

Bunbury, that Lord Ilchester delivered the letters to his daughter with

his own hand, and without suspicion. The couple used to meet at Miss

Read’s, the artist;—that is, Catherine Read, who painted whole bevies

of our grandmothers, and whose portraits of young Queen Charlotte and

of that dreadful woman Mrs. Macauley (represented as a Roman matron

weeping over the lost liberties of her country) were the delight of both

connoisseurs and amateurs.

The meetings of the lovers became known to the lady’s proud sire, and

terrible was the scene which ensued between the “père noble” and the

“ingénue.” The latter however promised to break off all intercourse,

provided she were permitted to take one last farewell. She waited a day

or two, till she was of age; and then, “instead of being under lock and

key in the country, walked downstairs, took her footman, said she was

going to breakfast with Lady Sarah, but would call at Miss Read’s; in the

street, pretended to recollect a particular cap in which she was to be

drawn; sent the footman back for it, whipped into a hackney chair, was

married at Covent Garden Church, and set out for Mr. O’Brien’s villa at

Dunstable.”

This marriage was, as I have said, thought worse of than if the

bridegroom had been a lacquey. The latter appear to have been in singular

esteem, dead or living. Thus we read that the Duchess of Douglas, in

1765, having lost a favourite footman rather suddenly in Paris, she had

him embalmed, and went to England, with the body of “Jeames” tied on in

front of her chaise. “A droll way of being chief mourner,” says Walpole,

who adds some droll things upon the English whom he encountered in

journeying through France. When half a mile from Amiens, he met a coach

and four with an equipage of French, and a lady in pea-green and silver,

a smart hat and feather, and two _suivantes_. “My reason told me,” says

the lively Horace, “it was the Archbishop’s concubine; but luckily my

heart whispered that it was Lady Mary Coke. I jumped out of my chaise,

fell on my knees, and said my first Ave Maria, gratiâ plena!”

The esteem of the ladies for their liveried servitors does not appear to

have been in all cases reciprocal, if we may believe a circumstance which

took place at Leicester House, the residence of the Prince of Wales, in

1743, when one of his Royal Highness’s coachmen, who used to drive the

maids of honour, was so sick of them, that he left his son three hundred

pounds upon condition that he never _married_ a maid of honour!

There was laxity both of manners and dress as time went on; and as we

were an ill-dressed, so were we an ill-washed people. In the latter half

of the last century we were distinguished as the only people in Europe

who sat down to dinner without “dressing” or washing of hands. Indeed we

were for a long time “not at all particular.”

Fashions, cleanly or otherwise, often come by the clever exercise of

wit. Thus the Russian confraternity made little fortunes through a

well-timed joke perpetrated by Count Rostopchin. And the joke was cut

after the following fashion. The Emperor Paul had an undisguised contempt

for Russian princes, and loved to lower their dignity. He was one day

surrounded by a glittering crowd of them, attired in gold lace and dirty

shirts, when he carelessly asked his favourite Count Rostopchin, how

it happened that he had never gained the slight distinction of being

created a prince. “Well, your Majesty,” said the Count, “it arises

entirely from the circumstance that my ancestors, who were originally

Tartars, came to settle in Russia just as winter was setting in.” “And

what of that?” asked Paul. “Why,” answered the Count, “whenever a Tartar

chief appeared at court for the first time, the sovereign left it to his

option either to be made a prince or to receive the gift of a pelisse.

Now as it was hard mid-winter when my grandfather arrived at court, he

had sense enough to prefer the pelisse to the princeship.” This satire

gave the fashion to the Rostopchin cloaks, of which our grandfathers who

travelled in Russia used to tell long stories, that were not half so good

as Rostopchin’s brief wit.

Here was a fashion arising from a joke; but they have been as often

“set” by very serious causes. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, the

prevailing colour in all dresses was that shade of brown called the

“couleur Isabelle,” and this was its origin. A short time after the

siege of Ostend commenced in 1601, Isabella Eugenia, Gouvernante of the

Netherlands, incensed at the obstinate bravery of the defenders, is said

to have made a vow that she would not change her chemise till the town

surrendered. It was a marvellously inconvenient vow, for the siege,

according to the precise historians thereof, lasted three years, three

months, three weeks, three days, and three hours; and her highness’s

garment had wonderfully changed its colour before twelve months of the

time had expired. The ladies and gentlemen of the court resolved to

keep their mistress in countenance, and after a struggle between their

loyalty and their cleanliness, they hit upon the compromising expedient

of wearing dresses of the presumed colour finally attained by the

garment which clung to the Imperial Archduchess by force of religious

obstinacy—and something else.

Mrs. Sherwood offers us, in her posthumous ‘Life,’ a fair picture of

the fashion and simplicity of the good old country rector in the last

century, as regards the adorning of the outer man. Her father, the Rev.

Dr. Butt, was Rector of Kidderminster; he is the hero of the story, which

Mrs. Sherwood shall tell herself.

“My father was invited to dine at Lord Stamford’s, at his seat at

Enville, not very distant from Kidderminster.

“It was the custom, when he was to go out, for some competent person

to arrange his best cloth suit on a sofa in his study, his linen and

stockings being in a wardrobe in the same room. On this day he was

very much engaged in writing. However, thinking that he would be quite

prepared when apprised that John and the horses were ready, he laid down

his pen at an early hour, and dressed himself, laying his old black

suit, neatly folded, as was his wont, on the sofa, from whence he had

taken the best one; this being done, to make the best of his time, he

sat down to write again, till admonished that the horses were waiting.

‘Bless me!’ he cried, ‘and I not dressed!’ and he hurried himself to put

on again fresh linen and another pair of silk stockings, whilst, as his

old coat and waistcoat, which lay where the new ones ought to have been,

came most naturally to hand, they were put on, and a great coat over

all concealed the mischief from John and my mother; and away he drove,

reaching Enville but a little time before dinner. My father happened to

know Lord Stamford’s butler, an old and valued servant; and as he stopped

in the hall to take off his great coat, Mr. Johnson, having looked hard

at his attire, said, ‘My dear Sir, you have a large hole in your elbow,

and the white lining is visible.’ ‘Indeed!’ said my father; ‘how can that

be?’—and, after some reflection, he made out the truth as it really had

happened. ‘Well!’ said Mr. Johnson, not a little amazed with the story,

‘come to my room, and we will see what is to be done.’ So he took my

father, who was in high glee at the joke, into his own precincts, and

brushed him, and inked his elbow, and put him into better order than the

case at first seemed possible (_sic_). When all was complete, he said,

‘Now, Sir, go into the drawing-room; set a good face on the matter; say

not a word on the subject; and my life for it, not a lady or gentleman

will find you out.’ My father promised to be vastly prudent; and as he

was always equally at home in every company, on the principle of feeling

that every man was his brother, he was not in the least disturbed by

the consciousness of his old coat and inked elbow. Thus everything

went on prosperously until dinner was nearly over. My dear father,

having probably, as usual, found the means of putting everybody in good

humour about him, he turned towards the butler, and said, ‘Johnson, it

must not be lost!’ The good man frowned and shook his head, but all in

vain. ‘It is much too good, Johnson,’ he added; ‘though you are ever so

angry with me, I must tell it.’ And then out came the whole story, to

the great delight of the whole noble party present, and to the lasting

gratification of my father himself; for he never failed to be highly

pleased whenever he told the story; and it was no small addition to the

tale, to tell of the scolding he got, before he came away, from the

honest butler, whose punctilio he had most barbarously wounded.”

Since the beginning of the present century, the laws of fashion have been

more stringent, those of taste ever execrable. Taste, in its true sense,

and as applied to costume, has never of late been

“The admiration

Of this short-coated population,—

This sew’d-up race, this button’d nation,—

Who, while they boast their laws so free,

Leave not one limb at liberty;

But live, with all their lordly speeches,

The slaves of buttons and tight breeches.”

Even George IV. and his favourites could not bless or curse the nation

with a taste for dress. After all, we are better off in that respect

than the Italians of the last century, who were accustomed to walk abroad

without hats, and with parasols and fans; and we do not desire to see

Kensington Gardens like that at Schesmedscher, near Bucharest, of the

figures on which gay stage the correspondent of the ‘Daily News’ thus

graphically speaks:—

“From three o’clock in the afternoon till an hour after sunset the place

is crowded with boyards, boyardines, and the sons and daughters of the

same, shopkeepers, peasants, gipsies, officers, and cadets, without

any distinction of rank, but all dressed regardless of expense, and

swaggering in thoroughly peacock pride. We have matter-of-fact people,

practical people, go-ahead people, ingenious people, etc., but without

exception this is the ‘dressiest’ people of Europe. To see the manner

in which the young people fig themselves out here, one might imagine

that millinery, hosiery, and tailors’ goods were a profitable investment

of capital. When one has been awhile in the East one generally ceases

to wonder at varieties of costume; but the _beau monde_ of Bucharest

in holiday attire might well rouse the most nonchalant or phlegmatic

into surprise and attention. Fashions of dress seldom remain long in

one’s memory. The man who this year enters the Park with a terribly

broad-brimmed hat does not remember for a moment that twelve months

previously he would have been miserable had he worn one with a brim more

than an eighth of an inch wide. It needs engravings to call up really

vivid recollections of what one’s-self, as well as every one else, wore

ten, twenty, or thirty years ago; and Bucharest recalls very vividly a

certain class of engravings. Every one is familiar with those splendid

works of art which represent his Majesty George III. reviewing the

Middlesex Volunteers in Hyde Park, the Pump Room in Bath, Charing-cross

at the period of the erection of Nelson’s Column, or any other remarkable

scene as it appeared in the days of that illustrious individual, Mr.

Brummell. Your readers well remember the broad-crowned Caroline hats,

the short-waisted coats, the long-tailed surtouts, the ‘pumps’ and

Hessian boots, in which fashionables strutted at that period. All this,

and more, is to be seen here. Young men walk about in sky-blue cutaway

coats with brass buttons and shockingly short skirts, trousers almost as

tight as the ancient pantaloons, and cream-coloured kid gloves. Others

appear on promenade with coats whose tails descend to their heels, and

others again in all the brilliancy of the latest Paris fashions. The

contrast and _mélange_ are curious and infinitely amusing, and the

display of jewellery is immense. In short, in London I would take the

proudest man in the place for a linendraper’s shopman in his Sunday

clothes. It is in the article of gloves however that most extravagance is

displayed. White or cream-coloured is the colour _de rigueur_. Present

yourself to a Wallachian lady to pay a visit, with your hands cased in

anything more durable, and you excite as great a sensation as if you

walked into a London drawing-room in top-boots. Nor must you go about the

town on foot; a _birtcha_, or two-horse open hackney carriage or calèche,

at two zwanzigers an hour, is indispensable. The vehicles are however

generally very good and clean, and the drivers civil; disputes about

fares are unknown.”

A portion of the above looks like a scene in a pantomime, and this

induces me to offer a remnant or two of remark connected with stage

costumes.

REMNANTS OF STAGE DRESSES.

“All these presentments

Are only mockeries, and wear false faces.”

CHAPMAN’S ‘BUSBY D’AMBOIS.’

There were few people who wore such a stage-look in the last century as a

country squire in London. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff speaks of one whom he had

just seen in the Park. He was of a bulk and stature, we are told, larger

than the ordinary; “had a red coat, flung open to show a gay calamanco

waistcoat; his periwig fell in a very considerable batch upon each

shoulder; his arms naturally swung at an unreasonable distance from his

sides, which, with the advantage of a cane that he brandished in a great

variety of irregular motions, made it unsafe for any one to walk within

several yards of him.”

If this was the public dress of a country gentleman, the town fops had

their own costume for their own stage. There was the dapper gentleman,

with his cane hanging to the fifth button. The smart fop rejoiced in

red-heeled shoes and a hat hung, rather than cocked, upon one side of the

head. The set of “a good periwig made into a twist” denoted the “fellow

of mettle.” The coffee-house politician was known by the moustache of

snuff on his upper lip; and the lords of acres, as I have just remarked,

by their glaring scarlet coats.

The walks looked like a masquerade scene at a time of high carnival, and

bad taste reigned undisturbed. Reformers however sought to amend it;

and Paul Whitehead, the tailor-poet, used to say that the taste of the

nation depended upon Garrick! Davy’s own taste was very questionable in

some respects, for he played Macbeth in the then costume of a general

officer, with scarlet coat, gold lace, and a tail-wig. All the other

actors were attired in similar dresses; and if Malcolm, on seeing Rosse

at a distance, exclaimed, “My countryman!” he was quite right to exclaim,

on seeing an English recruiting sergeant advance, “and yet I know him

not!” But Rosse might have said as much of Malcolm. It was Macklin who

first put Macbeth and all the characters into national costume, when he

played the chief character himself, in 1773; and all the thanks he got

for it was in the remark that he looked like a drunken Scotch piper—which

he did. But Macbeth in kilts is nearly as great an anomaly as when he is

in the uniform of a brigadier-general; and even Mr. Charles Kean, though

he exhibited the Thane short-petticoated, seemed glad to get into long

clothes and propriety as soon as the Thane had grown into a king.

Macklin was a comedian rather than a tragedian, and it is singular that

it is to another comic actor we owe the correct dressing of Othello.

It was in the latter character that Foote made his first appearance in

London, at the Haymarket, in 1744. He was announced as a “gentleman”

whose Othello “will be new dressed, after the manner of his country.”

Mr. Wright would now play the character with about as much propriety

and equal success, or the want of it. Foote is said to have looked very

much like the black boy with the tea-kettle in Hogarth’s ‘Marriage à la

Mode.’ “Bring the tea-kettle and lamp!” was Quin’s exclamation, when he

saw Garrick enter, blacked as Othello. And we may note that, at this

time, if a stage-manager were not acting in any piece represented during

the evening, he was exempted from coming before the audience, whatever

confusion might reign in the house. He was said to be not dressed. Austin

never so much offended Garrick as when he bought a cast-off dress, the

exact counterpart of that worn by Garrick himself in Lothario, and in

which Austin intended to accompany Roscius on the stage. It was assumed

on purpose to annoy Garrick, who wanted Austin to increase the number of

companions who should surround the gallant, gay Lothario; and Austin’s

method of obedience made Davy eager to excuse his humble friend’s

attendance.

A better illustration of stage costume is afforded us in the story of (I

think) Bensley. He had to play Henry VI. in ‘Richard the Third.’ After

the monarch’s death in the early part of the play, he had to appear

for a moment or two as his own ghost, in the fifth act. The spirits

were at that time exhibited _en buste_, by a trap. Now our Henry was

invited out to supper, and being anxious to get there early, and knowing

that little more than his shoulders would be seen by the public, he

retained his black velvet vest and bugles; but, discarding the lower

part of his stage costume, he drew on a jaunty pair of new, tight,

nankeen pantaloons, to be as far dressed for his supper company as he

could. When he stood on the trap, he cautioned the men who turned the

crank not to raise him as high as usual, and of course they promised

to obey. But a wicked low comedian was at hand, whose love of mischief

prevailed over his judgement, and he suddenly applied himself with such

goodwill to the winch that he ran King Henry up right to a level with

the stage; and moreover gave his majesty such a jerk, that he was forced

to step from the trap on to the boards, to save himself from falling.

The sight of the old Lancastrian monarch in a costume of two such

different periods,—mediæval above, all nankeen and novelty below,—was

destructive of all decorum both before the stage and upon it. The

audience emphatically “split their sides;” and as for the tyrant in the

tent, he sat bolt upright, and burst into such an insane roar, that the

real Richard could not have looked more frantically hysterical had the

deceased Henry actually so visited him in the nankeen spirit.

Mrs. Barry is said to have been a very elegant dresser; but, like most

of her contemporaries, she was not a very correct one. Thus, in the

‘Unhappy Favourite,’ she played Queen Elizabeth, and, in the scene of the

crowning, she wore the coronation robes of James the Second’s queen; and

Ewell says that she gave the audience a strong idea of the first-named

Queen. Anne of Modena, with the exception of some small details, was

dressed as little like Elizabeth as Queen Victoria was dressed like

Anne. Royal dresses in earlier days were not turned to such base uses.

Wichtlaf, King of the Mercians, gave his purple coronation robes to the

monks of courteous Croyland; and they wore the same, cut up into copes

and chasubles, at the service of the altar. Goodman, the comedian,

who left the stage towards the close of the seventeenth century, was

originally a Cambridge student, celebrated for his extravagance in dress,

and for his being expelled for cutting and defacing the picture of the

Duke of Monmouth, Chancellor of the University. He took to the stage, and

was successful; but his salary was not sufficient to enable him to dress

as he liked, and consequently he was “compelled,” as he himself said,

“to take the air.” The light comedian, when the play was over, mounted a

horse, turned highwayman, and was brought thereby so near to the gallows,

that it was only the sign manual of James II. that saved his neck. The

famous Duchess of Cleveland, “_my_ Duchess,” as Goodman used to call her,

ought not to have left her handsome favourite in such a mean condition.

His condition was so mean, that he and a fellow comedian, named Griffin,

lived in one room, shared the same bed, and had but one shirt between

them. This they wore alternately. It happened that one of them had to pay

a visit to a lady, and wished to wear the shirt out of his turn; and

this wish so enraged the other, that a fierce battle ensued, which ended,

like many other battles, in the destruction of the prize contended for,

and the mutual damage of the combatants.

Jevon was another of the actors of this period who was noted for his

dress and easy manners. The latter were particularly easy. As an example

of it, I may remark that one day, as he entered a club room, he took a

clean napkin from one of the tables, and wiped therewith his muddy shoes.

The waiter begged him to wait till he fetched a coarser cloth. “No, thank

you, my lad,” said Jevon, “this will serve me well enough. I’m neither

proud nor particular.”

Wilks the actor was the great ruler in matters of dress about this time.

He was exceedingly simple in his tastes off the stage, but he was the

best-dressed man upon it; and what he adopted was universally followed.

An eminent critic, writing of this actor in 1729, says:—“Whatever he did

on the stage, let it be ever so trifling,—whether it consisted in putting

on his gloves, or taking out his watch, lolling on his cane, or taking

snuff,—every movement was marked by such an ease of breeding and manner,

everything told so strongly the involuntary motion of a gentleman,

that it was impossible to consider the character he represented in any

other light than that of reality; but what was still more surprising,

that person who could thus delight an audience from the gaiety and

sprightliness of his manner, I met the next day in the street hobbling

to a hackney coach, seemingly so enfeebled by age and infirmities, that

I could scarcely believe him to be the same man.” This splendid dresser

exercised charity in a questionably liberal manner. He was a father to

orphans, and left his widow with scarcely enough to find herself in

cotton gowns.

Our provincial theatres exhibit some strange anomalies with regard to

costume, and there the sons and daughters of today have middle-aged

sires wearing the costume of the time of George I. But the most singular

anomaly in dress ever encountered by my experience was at a small theatre

in Ireland, not very far from Sligo. The entertainment consisted of

‘Venice Preserved,’ and the balcony scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ The

Venetian ladies and gentlemen were attired in every possible variety

of costume; yet not one of them wore a dress that could have been

distinguished at any period as being once worn by any people, civilized

or savage. Jaffier and Pierre however presented the greatest singularity,

for they were not only indescribably decked, but they had but one pair

of buskin boots between them; and accordingly, when it was necessary for

both to be in presence of the audience, each stood at the side-scene with

a single leg protruded into sight and duly booted! When a soliloquy was

to be delivered, the actor came forward, as easy in his buskins as though

they belonged to himself, and were not enjoyed by a partner, _à la_ Box

and Cox. Nor was this all. The appointments of the entire house were of

the same character. The roof was of tiles, the seats in the pit were of

potato-sacks and sacks of potatoes; and never did I laugh so much at a

tragedy as when a torrent of rain fell upon audience and actors, and

Juliet went through the balcony scene in a dirty bed-gown, and under a

cotton umbrella.

I may observe that this Juliet, though unmarried, was spoken of as “Mrs.”

and not “Miss,” for the reason that she was old enough to _be_ the

former. This was invariably the rule on our own stage a century and a

half ago; and Cibber, in the ‘Lady’s Last Stake,’ calls two of his female

characters _Miss_ Notable and _Mrs._ Conquest, though both are unmarried;

but the former is hardly old enough to be a bride, and the latter might

have had daughters of her own. Another coincidence struck me in the Irish

theatre. The performances were announced as for the benefit of a certain

actor _and his creditors_. I should have set this down to Irish humour,

had I not remembered having read that Spiller, in 1719, had made the same

announcement at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

But enough of these remnants. I leave them, to portray an illustrative

drama, the chief character in which was enacted by one who was great in

costume; and who may therefore claim to have his story, hitherto told but

to the select few, placed upon our record.

THREE ACTS AND AN EPILOGUE.

“My youth

Pass’d through the tropics of each fortune, I

Was made her perfect tennis-ball; her smiles

Now made me rich and honour’d; then her frowns

Dash’d all my joys, and blasted all my hopes.”

_THE HUNTINGDON DIVERTISEMENT,

played at Merchant Tailors’, 1678._

ACT I.

“Balthazar,” said a fine-looking lad in the prison of Orléans, “you are a

brute!”

By way of reply to this testimonial to character, the gaoler struck

the boy with his heavy bunch of keys on the head. The blow sent young

Edmond staggering against the wall. He recovered himself, however, and

dauntlessly repeated—

“Balthazar, you are nothing better than a brute!”

And Edmond Thierry was right. Balthazar was not only a brutal gaoler, but

he took delight in his vocation. He had abandoned the honest calling of

a “marbrier,” to take upon him the duties of guarding the victims whom

Republican suspicion had consigned to captivity, and whom it destined to

death. There is no doubt but that Balthazar was a brute.

But brute as he was, his prisoners despised him. They endured, but they

defied him. His hand might smite, but his ferocity could not subdue them.

They _would_ be happy, and their determination only rendered him the more

ferocious. From the old Briton gentleman, Pantin de la Guerre, to little

Edmond Thierry, there was not one whom he would not daily cuff, and cuff

all the harder from the conviction that they dared not, for their lives,

strike again an officer of the Republic, one and indivisible.

Balthazar then was incontestably a brute; and young Thierry had just told

him so, for the third time, when the youthful Madame de Charry opened

the door of her cell and entered the gallery. The latter was secured at

either end by an iron grating, which was always locked; but the cells

themselves, twelve in number, with three or four occupants in each, were

barred and fastened only at night. The “citizens” inhabiting them were

untried aristocrats; and until the law condemned them to death, they were

allowed the liberty of an obscure gallery, from which they could not by

any means escape to freedom.

The proud beauty who, albeit so young, had been some months a widow, was

passing on her way to an adjacent cell, but she paused for an instant to

kiss young Edmond on the brow, and to address some words of remonstrance

to Balthazar touching his treatment of the little King of the Gallery, as

Thierry was called.

“May our holy mother the guillotine hug him as she did our other king,

Capet!” said Balthazar. “The little reptile taunted me, because his

father has escaped from Amiens and reached England; and he refused,

moreover, to carry the pretty message I gave him from the public accuser,

and addressed to you, citoyenne.”

The boy’s eyes filled with tears. They sprang, like the twin fountains of

Benasji, from a divided source. Joy sent them gushing at the thought of

his father’s escape; and sorrow paid its tribute at the peril which was

then threatening his good friend, Madame de Charry.

That lady loosened her bracelet, readjusted it on her marble arm, and

asked, as she did so, what the public accuser could possibly have to say

_to her_.

“Ah! ah!” roared Balthazar, the brute; “he invites you to honour the

tribunal with your presence tonight; and the _faucheuse_ with the broad

knife will send you an invitation to another party tomorrow.”

“Be it so,” said the young beauty, without apparent emotion. “In the

meantime, _vive le Roi_! And now, my little King Edmond, let us leave

citizen Balthazar to his reflections, and come with me to the _soirée_ of

Madame de Bohun.”

“They will cut off your head!” cried Balthazar, with a candour meant for

cruelty.

“_They!_” said the lady, with great sweetness; “not if they are gallant

gentlemen. They will be the very _canaille_ of butchers indeed, if they

strike off so pretty a head as mine: _n’est-ce pas, mon roi?_” said she

to Edmond.

But the boy’s heart was too full to answer, for he loved the charming

Stoic of Orléans. His courage, however, was not buried beneath his

emotion; for as he entered the cell of the Countess de Bohun, he turned

and gave the huge Balthazar a kick on the right shin, which made the tall

savage turn pale. The giant vowed vengeance at a better opportunity, and

he limped away to his kennel, cursing the authorities for keeping alive

a Royalist child at the expense of the Republic, and for the particular

annoyance of their own _citoyen officiel_.

It was a singular world that, which Balthazar held in durance within his

stronghold of Orléans. It was an aristocratic, pleasure-seeking world:

within one confined gallery all the pomps and vanities of the earth,—all

the weaknesses of nature,—all the vices and some of the virtues of

humanity reigned triumphant. The sword of Damocles hung over every head,

but the symbol was taken for the _oriflamme_ of pleasure. The fashions

and pursuits of the old world were not forgotten within the prison walls.

The rich arranged their domiciles with as much care and anxiety as though

the boudoirs they fitted up in their dungeons were taken for a fixed

term of years, instead of an uncertain tenure of minutes. Fashion had its

rigid laws, Etiquette was enshrined, and _Ennui_ denounced. The duties,

dresses, and pleasures of the day were distinctly defined; and the duties

generally consisted in getting ready the dresses for the better enjoyment

of the pleasures. The separation of castes was rigorously observed, and

common misfortune was not permitted to level ranks; the noble captive

might be courteous to the commoner in captivity, but he would not

associate with him. The wife of a noble would not visit the cell which

contained the spouse of a professional man. During the day visits were

not only regularly made between parties of the same degree, but were

punctually returned; else discord arose thereat. Contests at chess,

trials at cards, games at forfeits, shuttlecock, and ball, were matters

of daily occurrence during the days, weeks, or months that preceded

condemnation or enlargement. The high-caste nobility got up pic-nic

dinners amongst themselves. Those who were of the very top cream of even

that high caste found tea for large parties. Music was no rarity; singing

awoke the echoes of every cell. In short, the habits, customs, manners,

morals, frivolities, fashions, and virtues of the upper classes were

openly practised. The greatest care was exhibited in matters of toilet.

As republican simplicity grew more republican and more simple without,

aristocratic fashions waxed more royal and more sumptuous within. A head

after the fashion of Brutus, was never seen upon noble shoulders. Among

the ladies there was a mania for flowers, feathers, and many-coloured

ribbons. Some wore their own hair, and some wore wigs, but in either

case the hair was curled and powdered, and the fair wearer was rouged,

Spanish-whitened (where _blanc d’Espagne_ was to be procured), pencilled,

and plastered into all the beauty that could be achieved by burying her

own beneath poisonous paint, black-lead, and adhesive _mouches_.

At Orléans the necessity for _some_ change of air, and for taking _some_

exercise, caused the younger people, on certain days of the week, when

permitted, to have recourse to the vast courtyard of the prison. Fashion

here reigned as she had been wont to do at the Tuileries. Here were given

concerts _al fresco_; and _les graces_ became the favourite game of the

hour. It even occasionally happened—for Love, like Virtue, _will_ make

his way into strange places—that affections were aroused, and attachments

between young hearts worthy of a purer locality sprang up, throwing a

charm over the wearisomeness of captivity. Death stood on permanent

guard, looking over the wall of that vast prison; and his gaunt, long

arm often plunged into the crowd below, and dragged up a victim. But

each individual there, caring little for the teaching of the past or

the prospects of the future, endured and yet forgot everything. Each

considered every fellow-captive exposed to death, but none was without

hope for himself. Like the selfish Neapolitans, who, when they see a

neighbour borne to the grave, shrug their shoulders, and cry, “Salute

a noi!” so did the Orléans prisoners, on losing an old companion, bury

sympathy for the departed in congratulations at their own escape.

It was early in a summer’s afternoon when Madame de Charry, with Edmond,

entered the cell whose oldest occupant and recognized proprietor was

the Countess de Bohun, a lady who had once borne the honoured name of

De Girardin. A large party was assembled, and, save the locality, the

hour, and the absence of lights, there was little to distinguish it from

a party in the Chaussée d’Antin. Some were at cards, some were looking

at pictures, some were circulating scandal, and a few were sipping _eau

sucrée_, heightened as to flavour with a little capillaire. François

Vouillet, the son of a chair-mender, was there playing the guitar. His

poverty had not saved him from the suspicion of holding aristocratic

opinions, nor had his misfortune procured for him any commiseration

from the aristocrats. He attended among them as a hired musician, and

he played for the dinner which he could not purchase. The appearance of

the new-comers interrupted the song, for a shout of _Vive le Roi_ hailed

the arrival of Edmond, and the most courteous welcomings that of his

companion. M. de Bohun, who was attired in a flannel dressing-gown, and

the only individual in the cell not in full dress, advanced to Madame de

Charry and gallantly kissed her on the brow.

“You are becoming Republican in your tastes,” said that exquisite lady,

as she pointed to the flannel _robe de chambre_.

“Madame,” said the Count, laughing, “I am twice as aristocratic as the

Prince de Ligne, the very quintessence of a knight and a nobleman. It

is not two years since we visited him at Vienna, and he received the

Countess and myself in no other dress than his shirt.”

“Oh!” exclaimed all the ladies at once.

“It is true,” exclaimed Madame de Bohun, corroboratively, “and yet short

of the truth: he had one arm withdrawn from the sleeve, and within it he

took my own, and led me into the apartment of his young daughter-in-law.”

It was within an hour of the evening period for locking up, when the

wife of Balthazar entered the room with but scant attention to ceremony,

and telling Edmond as she passed him, that she had just well-beaten her

husband for his cruelty towards the “little king” of the prison, she

advanced towards Madame de Charry and whispered something in her ear.

With all her courage, the fair creature slightly trembled; but she arose,

begged the Chevalier Fabien to play out her cards, and promised speedily

to return. An inquiring look was directed to her by all the company,

but she gave it no reply, either by word or gesture. She left the cell,

accompanied by the gaoler’s wife, and followed by Edmond. The latter, in

speechless fear, saw her descend to the courtyard between two gendarmes.

The wicket was locked upon him, but from the window he beheld her rudely

pushed into a building in which the revolutionary tribunal was wont to

hold its bloody sittings.

The “little king” burst into tears, a weakness of which he became

half-ashamed when he felt the arm of the gaoler’s wife passed round his

neck, and heard words of condolence fall from the lips of the subduer of

the prison tyrant.

From this period they stood in utter silence for a quarter of an hour,

at the end of which time they saw Madame de Charry brought out from the

building and made to enter a cart, which was driven and backed up to

the steps expressly to receive her. At the sound of a broken glass and

a boy’s scream, her face, pale and dignified, was turned to the window,

through which Edmond had thrust his head. She smiled the sweet smile of

a dying saint, and the radiancy of a martyr seemed to glow around her as

she pointed to heaven, and with her eyes still fixed on the boy, uttered

the words, “Espérance! Adieu!” In another moment the cart received

two more victims, and, with its load of courageous misery, soon after

disappeared beneath the archway that led to the exterior of the prison.

Before the chimes of the cathedral had struck the next quarter, three

lives had been sacrificed, and Monsieur de Fabien had just won the game

with his cousin’s cards.

“Citizen Fabien!” roared the voice of Balthazar at the door of the cell.

“May I not speak a word with Madame de Charry before you lock us up for

the night?” said the Chevalier.

“The Citoyenne Charry has been dead these ten minutes,” answered the

brute with his usual bluntness, “and Citizen Fabien will never be locked

up here again.”

“Bah!” said the Chevalier, who not only felt sick, but looked so.

“The authorities are at the door, ready to read to you the decree which

discharges you from custody. The tribunal is growing tender; it has

demanded but three lives today. It sees no ground for accusing you,

and it has ordered the Citizen Edmond Thierry to find his way to his

father,—if he can. The ungrateful villain nearly threw me on my back as I

opened the wicket to set him free.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said De Fabien, who suddenly recovered both his

courage and his colour, “I wish you a good night, and luck like mine. I

am now eligible to the _bals à la guillotine_, for I have had a relative

who has been beheaded.”

“Poor Madame de Charry!” exclaimed the sympathetic ladies, as the tears

ran down their cheeks with laughing at the Chevalier’s drollery.

“Poor _me_!” said M. de Bohun, “for now Edmond is gone, who will sew on a

button for me, or mend a rent in my clothes?”