I put my silk hat away at night with the firm resolution that nothing short
of an invitation to Buckingham Palace, or some similar incredible disaster,
should make me drag it into the light again. For the truth is that the war
has given the top-hat a knock-out blow. It had been tottering on our brows
for some time. There was a very hot summer a few years ago which began the
revolution. The tyranny of the top-hat became intolerable, and quite
"respectable" people began to be seen in the streets with Panamas and
straws. But these were only concessions to an irresponsible climate, and
the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City
civilisation. And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to
becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches. It is almost
as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet
Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear
it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a
splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a
result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember
that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was
that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that
might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig
returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in
_The Rivals_ there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was
never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it
began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not
a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which
set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of
the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When
Lady Percy in _Henry IV._ is lamenting Hotspur she says:--