any form of lovely costume perfectly practicable in our cold
climate. Mr. Godwin, it is true, points out that the English
ladies of the thirteenth century abandoned after some time the
flowing garments of the early Renaissance in favour of a tighter
mode, such as Northern Europe seems to demand. This I quite admit,
and its significance; but what I contend, and what I am sure Mr.
Godwin would agree with me in, is that the principles, the laws of
Greek dress may be perfectly realized, even in a moderately tight
gown with sleeves: I mean the principle of suspending all apparel
from the shoulders, and of relying for beauty of effect not on the
stiff ready-made ornaments of the modern milliner--the bows where
there should be no bows, and the flounces where there should be no
flounces--but on the exquisite play of light and line that one gets
from rich and rippling folds. I am not proposing any antiquarian
revival of an ancient costume, but trying merely to point out the
right laws of dress, laws which are dictated by art and not by
archaeology, by science and not by fashion; and just as the best
work of art in our days is that which combines classic grace with
absolute reality, so from a continuation of the Greek principles of
beauty with the German principles of health will come, I feel
certain, the costume of the future.

And now to the question of men's dress, or rather to Mr. Huyshe's
claim of the superiority, in point of costume, of the last quarter
of the eighteenth century over the second quarter of the
seventeenth. The broad-brimmed hat of 1640 kept the rain of winter
and the glare of summer from the face; the same cannot be said of
the hat of one hundred years ago, which, with its comparatively
narrow brim and high crown, was the precursor of the modern
"chimney-pot": a wide turned-down collar is a healthier thing than