If the ancient inhabitants of the world had extreme difficulty in
sheltering themselves from the severity of the seasons, they experienced
much more in giving to their clothes the impress of art or industry.
Consult Strabo; he will tell you that certain nations covered themselves
with the bark of trees, fig-leaves or rushes, rudely intertwined. Often
also the skins of animals were employed, without the least preparation,
for the same end. In proportion as the barbarism disappeared which had
been introduced by the confusion of tongues, they began to think of the
wool of sheep, and to ask themselves if there were no means of uniting
in a single thread the different pieces of this substance by the aid of
a kind of spindle. Seeing their efforts crowned with success, “Let us
now,” said they, “try to imitate the spider.” They did so; and, behold,
as Democritus begs us to observe, the art of weaving invented! After
that, the invariable custom which existed among the Jews, fifteen
hundred years before Jesus Christ, of collecting the fleeces of their
sheep at fixed periods; and great was the account which they made of it
according to the testimony of Genesis (31, 19.)
The history, true or fabulous, of the web of Penelope, the wife of
Ulysses, proves to us that wool was not the sole material to which they
thought of applying the art of weaving. And do we not read in Pliny that
“the cotton plant grew in Upper Egypt, that they made stuffs of it, and
that the Egyptian priests made admirable surplices of it?” It is
undeniable that garments of cotton and of linen were in use in the time
of the patriachs; indeed Moses commands his people in the 22d chapter of
Deuteronomy, “not to wear a dress of linen;” and the ancient
Babylonians, as Herodotus informs us, (Book I.) “wore immediately over
their skin a cambric tunic, which fell down to their feet in the
oriental manner.” It was the same among the Athenians, according to
Thucydides.
In the age of Augustus, many people had already arrived at great
perfection in the manufacture of linen stuffs: it is the express
assertion of the historian Pliny. “The Faventine cloth,” says he, “is
always whiter than the Allienne cloth. That which they have designated
by the word _Retovine_, is so exceedingly fine that its threads are as
slender as those of the spider. I have myself seen a thread of Cumes
hemp so thin that a great net made of this material could go through a
common ring; and I have heard tell of a man who could carry on his back
as much as was required to encircle an entire forest. The fine cambric,
made of the linen of Byssus, is a product of Achaia; it was sold in old
times for its weight in gold.” (Book 19.)
In the Egyptian Museum of the Royal Library of Paris, you may cast your
eyes upon mummies, found in the catacombs of Cairo: the cloth in which
they are wrapped is not at all coarser than the cambric of your shops;
and yet it has been woven three hundred years. On this occasion it is
not inappropriate to add that the art of weaving is still more ancient
than that of embalming; which this answer of Abraham to the king of
Sodom indicates: “I will not carry away a single thread of your wool,”
said the patriarch to him, “lest you should say—I have made Abraham
rich!” Elsewhere, Moses informs us that Abimelech presented a veil to
Sarah; that on the approach of Isaac, Rebecca covered her face with a
veil; and that when Joseph was appointed viceroy of Egypt, Prince
Pharaoh covered him with a linen robe after having placed his own ring
upon his finger. The Book of Job (the most ancient writing perhaps in
existence) mentions a weaver’s _shuttle_, (chapter 7.) A thousand years
before the Christian era, do you see, setting out along the desert,
those messengers of the wise Solomon, going to procure in Egypt cloths
of fine linen for the king, their master? Shortly after, the city of
Tyre obtained great celebrity for the beauty of its fine linens; and
Ezekiel dwells enraptured on the opulence of its merchants in the
following terms:—“All the planks of thy vessels are of the fine fir
tree of Senir, and their masts are of the cedar of Lebanon! For their
sails thou hast employed the fine linen of Egypt, splendidly
embroidered.” Do not suppose that all the sails of this period were of
as precious a material as those of the Tyrians: like those of the
Arabians of our days, they were generally composed of woven rushes.
The women commonly wore white dresses; besides, the ancients had early
made rapid progress in the art of bleaching. They were all ignorant, as
you may well suppose, of the expeditious process which the illustrious
Berthollet has conceived, with the assistance of a hydrochlorate of lime
or of soda; they knew, however, how to use other detersive substances to
impart a shining whiteness to their stuffs. “There exists among us,”
says Pliny, “a species of poppy, very rare, which bleaches linen cloth
wonderfully; and yet, would one believe it? we have among us a crowd of
people so vain that they have attempted to dye their linen as well as
their wool.” In alluding in another passage to the sky-blue curtains of
the Emperor Nero, he begs us not to forget that, despite of all the rich
shades produced by dyeing, _white_ cloth never ceased to enjoy the
highest reputation, to such a degree that they conferred the title of
_Great_ on a person named _Lentulus Spinter_, who first conceived the
idea of hanging white curtains around the places consecrated to the
Olympic games. This same kind of stuff was spread upon all the houses of
the _Via Sacra_, by order of Cæsar, the Dictator, who planning
magnificent decorations, wished that they should extend from his
residence up to the Capitol.
The basis of the hard soap of our days was undoubtedly known to the
ancients. The _natron_ or sub-carbonate of soda, which they collect in
the channels of the Nile at the present time, was really gathered there
in sufficient abundance in the first ages of the world. From another
place, the man of Uz made use of it; for he makes ready in one of his
chapters (Job, ch. 9.) to wash his clothes in a pit with _bor_ or
_borith_, a plant much esteemed on account of its alkaline properties.
(You must not confound this with the _boron_ of modern chemistry, which
with oxygen constitutes the boracic acid.) Open the Sixth Book of the
Odyssey; Homer will there shew you Nausicaa, and her companions,
trampling their clothes with their feet to whiten them for an
approaching marriage; the bard adds that the ladies knew perfectly well
the property which the atmosphere possessed of assisting in the
destruction of the only substance which imparts a greyish appearance to
cloths. In alluding to this passage, Goguet affirms that all the linen
and cotton garments were washed daily. An anecdote related by Apuleius
in his book of “The Golden Ass,” goes to prove still more the attention
which they formerly paid to the art of bleaching; “A wag,” said he to
us, “being secretly introduced into the house of a merchant, came near
being suffocated by the sulphurous gas which was given out by a
bleaching machine in which he was hid.”
The ability of the ancients to bestow upon their linen, cotton[2] and
woolen cloths a brightness not inferior to that of the snow of their
mountains, did not fail them when they had to dye them. More than three
thousand years ago a cunning shrew, as Genesis informs us, (ch. 28.)
fastened a scarlet ribbon around the hand of one of the children of
Tamar: and Homer speaks to us in the part of his poem above mentioned,
of the colored cloths of Sidon as admirable productions. Jacob made for
his beloved son Joseph, “a robe of many colors,” and the king of Tyre
sent into the palace of Solomon “a man skilful to work wonderfully in
gold, silver, &c. and to produce upon fine linen the shades of purple,
blue and crimson.” According to Herodotus, who wrote, as you know, four
hundred years before Jesus Christ, some people of Caucasus washed in
water the leaves of a certain tree, which yielded at length a brilliant
color, with the aid of which they drew upon stuffs the figures of lions,
monkeys, dolphins and vultures.
Among the brave knights who perished at Colchis, in the Argonautic
expedition, there was one whom the historian Valerius Flaccus
distinguishes by his painted tunic, at the same time that he expresses
his admiration of the whiteness of the fine cloth which the hero also
wore:
“Tenuia non illum _candentis_ carbossa lini,
Non auro depicta chalymis, non flava galeri
Cæsaries, _pictoque_ juvant subtemine bracæ.”
(Val. Flac. 6.)
Speaking of Colchis, it was there that the best materials for painting
were formerly procured. Besides, if you will ascend in spirit to the
days of old, you will perceive every year on the roads leading from
Georgia to the principal cities of India, as well as to Dimbeck, an
immense drove of two thousand camels, loaded with madder. Thence the
_red_[3] flowers were derived, of which Strabo speaks, which the nations
dwelling on the borders of the Indus and the Ganges loved to spread upon
their cloths. It is a particular worthy of remark that the Egyptians who
constantly clothed the statues of their goddess Isis with _linen_ and
_cotton_ drapery, never employed _wool_ for that purpose, a substance
which they hated so much that they did not permit the use of it, even in
interments, as the 44th chapter of Ezekiel informs us. This aversion
extended even to shepherds, for you may read in Genesis that every
shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. (46.)
The purple of Tyre was known at an epoch exceedingly remote, and the
dyers of Phœnicia surpassed in skill those of all the other nations of
the east. This people came a thousand years ago as far as Great Britain
to procure an enormous quantity of tin, a metal which has the property,
or rather certain salts of it have, of augmenting the intensity of the
principal red colors contained in many vegetable and animal substances.
Upon this subject, we would advise you to run over, in the third book of
Strabo, the interesting recital which he gives of the pursuit of a
Phœnician vessel by a Roman bark, which wished to seize the tin with
which it was freighted. It was in the neighborhood of the coast of
Cornwall: the Phœnician, seeing the prow of the Roman near his stern,
threw three-fourths of his cargo overboard, and steered right upon a
sand-bank, where the enemy, as you may well suppose, did not think of
following him. The Tyrians, astonished at the great opulence which their
city attained, attributed to the gods the magic art of dyeing in purple.
All writers, and especially Ctesias, physician to a king of Persia, who
lived four hundred years before the Christian era, and Ælian, a
contemporary of Alexander Severus, frequently allude to an insect, to
which the Phœnicians were indebted for the superior manner in which they
could produce an admirable scarlet. It was evidently the cochineal: and
this little animal must have been at that time less rare than at present
in Syria, India, and Persia, since the humblest classes frequently wore
stuffs dyed with purple. It is not surprising that they knew not how to
extract from the cochineal the most brilliant of all the known reds, the
carmine, before which the vermillion grows pale, and which chemistry can
procure for us, in our days, in great abundance; and you know that this
little insect lives upon the _cactus_ which grow in Brazil, in Mexico,
at Jamaica, and at Saint Domingo.
The fashion of wearing silk was unknown at Rome, before the beginning of
the empire. The rage for dressing in it was already so great in the time
of Tiberius, that the emperor prohibited the use of it by a positive
law. The Greeks also had a taste for it; and the cloak of _Amphion_ was
certainly of silk, for the historian Philostratus (Ion, Book I.) tells
us that its color changed according to the different ways in which the
light was reflected from it. Pliny gives us to understand that the gold
stuffs of the ancients were not made as those of our time, of a thread
of gold or silver, wrapped around a woof of silk, but that they were
woven of gold deprived of all alloy: knowing this, he speaks of the
manner in which the wife of Claudius dressed herself to attend a
_Naumachia_ or sea fight, in the following terms—“Nos vidimus
Agrippinam—indutam palludamento auro textile, _sine alia materia_.” It
is about fifty years since they extracted, by assaying, more than four
pounds weight of pure gold from some old dresses which the fathers of
the Clementine College, at Rome, discovered in an urn of basalt, buried
in their vineyard. Tarquin, the Elder, was he, among the Roman
Sovereigns who most usually wore dresses of gold.
From the time of Homer the Greeks wore _black_ dresses for mourning.
This bard shews us Thetis wearing, after the death of Patroclus, the
blackest of her dresses. (Iliad, 24.) For many years the same usage
prevailed among the Romans, but it was partly changed under the
emperors, so that when Plutarch wrote, the women in mourning could wear
nothing but white. Besides, we have a proof of it at the obsequies of
Septimius Severus: “The image of this emperor,” Herodian tells us,
“formed of wax, was surrounded on one side by a row of women in _white_,
and on the other by the body of all the senators, clothed in _black_. At
the death of the Empress Plotina,” adds the historian, “her husband
Trajan covered himself with very black habits for the space of nine
days.” The _toga_ necessarily received as many shades of color as the
other garments: but as to the form of this kind of robe it is impossible
to decide. When Dionysius, of Halicarnassus, asserts that the toga
presented the appearance of a semicircle (’ημικυκλος) he did not at all
intend to describe its shape, but only the form which it assumed when
worn upon the body. Strabo asserts that the military cloak with which
the warriors clothed themselves had an oval form; and that among the
Athenians it was often worn by the young people even in time of peace.
The _tunic_, which was the principal part of the under clothing, was not
generally used among the nations of antiquity, except the Greeks and
Romans; all the Cynic philosophers disdained to make use of it. We know
that Augustus put on as many as four tunics in winter. The name of this
great emperor reminds us that it was in his reign, or thereabouts, that
the Romans began to use table-cloths. Montfaucon believes that the
greater part of them were of cloth striped with gold and purple. In
France the ancient table-cloths were intended for collecting, after the
meal, the smallest crumbs that were left, that nothing might be lost;
and D’Arcy informs you that among our neighbors, the English, table
linen was very seldom used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
As there exist in our days many nations, especially in the torrid zone,
who do not wear _hats_, (a name by which we must understand every
covering for the head, as its etymology plainly indicates,) so it
formerly happened that the nations did not always think of making use of
them. Thus one of the most civilized, the Egyptians, went bare-headed,
according to the authority of Hesiod. Amongst the Orientals, and
especially amongst the Persians, the turban was in great vogue; that of
the sovereign was composed of a whole bale of muslin. It was from this
last mentioned people that the Jews derived the turban. The hats of the
Greeks must have had very large brims, to judge from the root of the
word (πετασος) which designated them. The Romans granted to their
freedmen the right of covering themselves with a kind of cap, which has
been since adopted as the emblem of liberty. It is to a Swiss, residing
in Paris, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, that we owe the
first invention of felt hats. They were generally known at the close of
the reign of Charles VII.: this monarch himself wore one at his
triumphal entry into Rouen, in 1449. We read in Daniel that the worthy
townsmen of that ancient city stood still as if petrified, so much were
they astonished at seeing his majesty’s hat; the historian adds that its
lining was of red silk, and that it was surmounted by a superb bunch of
feathers. Before the period of which we speak, it is probable that the
French covered their heads in the same way as the English, that is to
say, with woven caps or rather with cloth and silk hoods.
The stockings of the ancients were made of little pieces of cloth sewed
together. We cannot say with certainty in what country the
stocking-frame was invented. France, England and Spain respectively
claim this useful discovery. A short time before the unfortunate
tournament, in which Henry II. lost his life, he put on the first pair
of silk stockings ever worn. Five years afterward, we see in England,
William Ryder presenting a pair, as a very precious article, to William,
Earl of Pembroke. Ryder had learnt the method of making them from an
Italian merchant.
Many persons probably know not that _wooden shoes_ date from a very
remote period; for the Jews wore them long before the age of Augustus.
Perhaps they were not made exactly like the wooden shoes so common among
the poorer classes in France; but it is not less true that this kind of
covering for the feet was generally adopted among nearly all the people
of Judæa: sometimes, however, we observe leather shoes among them; and
the Jewish soldiers covered their feet with copper, or with iron. The
shoes of the Egyptians were of _papyrus_; the Chinese and the Indians
manufactured theirs of silk, of rushes, of the bark of trees, of iron,
of brass, of gold or of silver, according as their fortune permitted, or
their fancy dictated. At Rome, as in Greece, leather was the material
which covered the feet of every one. The Roman women wore _white_ shoes:
the common people wore _black_: and the magistrates set off their feet
with _red_ shoes on solemn occasions. A thousand years ago the most
powerful sovereigns of Europe had wooden soles to their shoes. Under
William Rufus, son of the great Duke of Normandy, who conquered at
Hastings, in 1066, a fashion was introduced into England of giving to
the shoes an excessive length; the point which terminated them was
stuffed with tow, and curved up on high like a ram’s horn. In the
fourteenth century they thought of connecting these points with the
knee, by means of a gold chain. Great must have been the surprise of the
worthy Anglo-Saxons, on beholding this strange species of vegetation
sprouting up suddenly amongst them! Some called to remembrance the
history of the serpent’s teeth, which Cadmus sowed, whence a swarm of
soldiers issued; others conceived that it was the costume of magicians;
and little children sometimes, when going to bed, asked their mothers if
there was no danger that their heads might be metamorphosed in the night
into those of a horrible deer? Before leaving this paragraph upon shoes,
we would call to recollection the antiquity of the art of the
leather-dresser: open for that purpose the Iliad, and you will find in
the Seventeenth Book, tanners preparing skins to make leather of them.
This class of manufacturers composed, three hundred years ago, a very
important body, since we possess the account of a furious quarrel which
broke out, under Queen Elizabeth, between them and the shoe-makers. We
are pleased to record here the perfection with which they manufacture
leather at this date in the New World. In South Carolina, as well as in
the state of Virginia, the Indian women are so skilful in this branch of
industry that a single person can dress as many as ten deer-skins a
day.[4] Of all the transformations which are wrought in the arts, that
of the animal substance into leather is, without doubt, one of the most
curious. The process, by means of which they set about accomplishing it
in old times, was the result of a calculation still more ingenious than
that of changing two opaque bodies into a transparent body to make
glass, for instance; or else two transparent bodies into an opaque body
for making soap. Besides, you know that chemistry actually teaches us
that leather is a real salt, a _tannate of gelatine_. This assertion was
not uttered with confidence until M. Pelouze had extracted from tan in
late years the tannic acid in a state of remarkable purity. Besides
this, you may now explain a phenomena which is repeated at a great
distance upon the ocean, at the time of some lamentable shipwreck. The
journal which records for you the history of one of these sad events
often tells you that in the last moment of famine, the unhappy survivors
took to eating their shoes, and that life is sometimes prolonged by
these means! Certainly, for the gelatine possesses nutritious
properties, even when its peculiarities are stained with a thousand
impurities, as is leather.
The subject upon which we have endeavored to present some observations,
is so capable of being extended that a large volume in octavo would
scarcely suffice to contain all the historical knowledge relating to it.
But such a dissertation, carried out to the extent or with the exactness
which it admits of, would only constitute at last a kind of catalogue or
bare enumeration of the thousand modifications which human vestures have
undergone down to our times. The memory of the reader would be unable to
retain so prodigious a number of minute particulars, and the curiosity
of his mind, fatigued by so many useless details, would be extinguished
before finishing the third part. These changes have often, it is true,
nothing for their object but the accessory and secondary parts of dress,
as the following passage, which we meet with in the _voyages_ of M. de
Chateaubriand, seems to point out.
“One thing has at the same time struck me and charmed me; I have met in
the dress of the Auvergne peasant the attire of the Breton peasant.
Whence comes this? It is because there was formerly for this kingdom,
and for all Europe, a _groundwork_ of a common attire.” (Vol. 2., p.
296.)
In another particular also, men have always been constant, that they
have never ceased to seek for the material to compose their clothing
from the animals which the Creator has placed in their respective
climates. It will probably be the same till the end of the world. It is
thus that the nations under the temperate zone have recourse for
covering to wool, because, being a bad conductor of caloric, it prevents
the escape of it from their bodies. In the frozen zone the Russians, the
Esquimaux, and the Greenlanders, clothe themselves in furs, a material
which is a still worse conductor of caloric; while the natives of
countries under the influence of the torrid zone, make their dresses of
hair or horse-hair, whose conducting properties are in an inverse ratio
to those of furs. It is worth remarking that the animals which in
temperate regions are covered with wool or ordinary hair, are provided,
when they inhabit countries really cold, with an under-fleece of very
fine wool: it is the case with goats, sheep, dogs, horses, and Thibet
cows.
If by a game of metempsychosis, you were enabled to return to existence
two hundred years hence, what unheard of changes would you not see in
the dress of individuals. Transport in anticipation your shade to a
point commanding one of the public promenades of the capital; suppose
yourself, for instance, on the top of the Vendôme Column, on a fine
summer’s evening; you would, perhaps, perceive the _dandies_ of the time
strutting in frocks, whose leg of mutton sleeves are as voluminous as
those of our sylphides at this day. Their hats, instead of being of
beaver or of fur, have a similar shape to that which our ladies adopted
in 1839. For the young folks a notched veil would be the prescribed
mode; the men, of a certain age, would embellish their hats with a
superb scarlet plume. As to the women, who will now dare to affirm that
they will not then cover their heads with perukes _à la_ Louis XIV.
topped off with three-cocked hats, and that from their chin there will
not descend a band _à la procureur du roi_? Extend your Pythagorean
glance farther into the ages, and you will, perhaps, discover another
part of mankind adding to their dress an enormous pair of wings! We may
doubt that the gnomes, the sciences, will never render the attempt to
make use of them more effectual than that of the son of Dædalus in old
times; but in return, posterity may fly by another process, in case the
æronauts can discover the secret of steering themselves in mid-air.
Should this expectation be realised, we may then hear one of your future
grand-nieces (who will be the belles of the noble Faubourg) say to her
domestic on rising from her breakfast, “Ganymede! my balloon, with its
boat; I wish to go dine to-day with my cousin, at Florence.”
-----
[2] It is generally believed that the word _calico_ is derived from
Calicut, a city on the coast of Malabar in Hindostan, whence the first
patterns of this stuff came to Europe.
[3] Dyers now know how to produce a very durable red by dipping their
stuffs in a solution of acetate of alum, before subjecting them to the
action of the madder. It would be desirable that they should begin to
derive some advantage, on a large scale, of a new substance, lately
discovered by Mr. Robiquet, which possesses the property of producing a
red amaranth or pansy, very agreeable. Chemists call this substance
_orsine_.
[4] This will be news to the people “in South Carolina, as well as in
the state of Virginia.” _Translator._
Philadelphia, May, 1841.
* * * * *