MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL.

Happier is our Professor, and more purely scientific and historic, when he
reaches the Middle Ages in Europe, and down to the end of the Seventeenth
Century; the true era of extravagance in Costume. It is here that the
Antiquary and Student of Modes comes upon his richest harvest. Fantastic
garbs, beggaring all fancy of a Teniers or a Callot, succeed each other,
like monster devouring monster in a Dream. The whole too in brief
authentic strokes, and touched not seldom with that breath of genius which
makes even old raiment live. Indeed, so learned, precise, graphical, and
every way interesting have we found these Chapters, that it may be thrown
out as a pertinent question for parties concerned, Whether or not a good
English Translation thereof might henceforth be profitably incorporated
with Mr. Merrick's valuable Work _On Ancient Armor_? Take, by way of
example, the following sketch; as authority for which Paulinus's
_Zeitkurzende Lust_ (ii. 678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to:

"Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century, we
might smile; as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to rise again, and
see our haberdashery, would cross themselves, and invoke the Virgin. But
happily no bygone German, or man, rises again; thus the Present is not
needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only grows out of it, like a Tree,
whose roots are not intertangled with its branches, but lie peaceably
underground. Nay it is very mournful, yet not useless, to see and know,
how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite
filled up here, and no room for him; the very Napoleon, the very Byron, in
some seven years, has become obsolete, and were now a foreigner to his
Europe. Thus is the Law of Progress secured; and in Clothes, as in all
other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue.