have all the real influence which their letters--excellent letters both
of them--certainly deserve.

I turn first to Mr. Huyshe's second letter, and the drawing that
accompanies it; but before entering into any examination of the theory
contained in each, I think I should state at once that I have absolutely
no idea whether this gentleman wears his hair longer short, or his cuffs
back or forward, or indeed what he is like at all. I hope he consults
his own comfort and wishes in everything which has to do with his dress,
and is allowed to enjoy that individualism in apparel which he so
eloquently claims for himself, and so foolishly tries to deny to others;
but I really could not take Mr. Wentworth Huyshe's personal appearance as
any intellectual basis for an investigation of the principles which
should guide the costume of a nation. I am not denying the force, or
even the popularity, of the ''Eave arf a brick' school of criticism, but
I acknowledge it does not interest me. The gamin in the gutter may be a
necessity, but the gamin in discussion is a nuisance. So I will proceed
at once to the real point at issue, the value of the late
eighteenth-century costume over that worn in the second quarter of the
seventeenth: the relative merits, that is, of the principles contained in
each. Now, as regards the eighteenth-century costume, Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe acknowledges that he has had no practical experience of it at all;
in fact, he makes a pathetic appeal to his friends to corroborate him in
his assertion, which I do not question for a moment, that he has never
been 'guilty of the eccentricity' of wearing himself the dress which he
proposes for general adoption by others. There is something so naive and
so amusing about this last passage in Mr. Huyshe's letter that I am
really in doubt whether I am not doing him a wrong in regarding him as
having any serious, or sincere, views on the question of a possible
reform in dress; still, as irrespective of any attitude of Mr. Huyshe's