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ENGLISH MALE COSTUME.

Suggested by Mr. Planche's Book on Costume.

R. PLANCHÉ'S book, besides being sensibly and amusingly written, in a clear, unaffected style, contains more than would be expected from its title. It narrates the military as well as civil history of British costume, giving us not only the softer vicissitudes of silks and satins, but ringing the changes of helms, hauberks, and swords, from the earliest period of the use of armor till the latest; and it will set the public right, for the first time, upon some hitherto mistaken points of character and manners. We have been surprised, for instance, to learn that our "naked ancestors" (as we supposed them), the ancient Britons, were naked only when they went to battle; and it turns out, that Richard the Third, instead of being one who thought himself—

"Not made to court an amorous looking-glass,"

was a dandy in his dress, and as particular about his wardrobe and coronation-gear as George the Fourth. This trait in his character is confirmative, we think, of the traditions respecting his deformity; men who are under that disadvantage being remarkable either for a certain nicety and superiority of taste, moral and personal, if their dispositions are good, or for all sorts

of mistakes the other way, under the reverse predicament. Two persons of the greatest natural refinement we ever met with have had a crook in the shoulder. Richard was a usurper, a man of craft and violence; and his jealousy of the respect of his fellow-men took the unhappier and more glaring turn. He thought to overcome them with his fine clothes and colors, as he had done with his tyranny. Richard partook, it seems, of the effeminate voluptuousness of his brother, Edward the Fourth, as Edward partook of Richard's cruelty.

Mr. Planché is of opinion that "the most elegant and picturesque costume ever worn in England” was that of the reign of Charles the First, commonly called the Vandyke dress, from its frequency in the portraits of that artist. The dresses of few periods, we think, surpass those of the Anglo-Saxon times, and of some of the Norman. (See the engravings in the book, at pages 22, 103, 121, and 127.) Some of the Anglo-Saxon ladies were dressed with almost as elegant a simplicity as the Greeks. But whatever Mr. Planché may think of the extreme gallantry and picturesqueness of the Vandyke dress, with its large hat and feathers, its cloak and rapier, and its long breeches meeting the tops of the wide boots, its superiority may surely be at least contested by the jewelled and plumed caps, the long locks, the vests, mantles, and hose of the reign of Henry the Seventh; especially if we recollect that they had the broad hats and feathers too, when they chose to wear them, and that they had not the "peaked" beard, nor a steeple crown to the hat. (See the figures, at pages 220 and 222;

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and imagine them put into as gallant bearing as those in the pictures of Vandyke. See also the portrait of Henry himself, at the beginning of the volume; and the cap, cloak, and vest of the Earl of Surrey, the poet, in the Holbein portrait of him in Lodge's Illustrations.)

It is a curious fact, that good taste in costume has by no means been in proportion to an age's refinement in other respects. Mere utility is a better teacher than mere will and power; and fashions in dress have generally been regulated by those who had power, and nothing else. Shakespeare's age was that of ruffs and puffs; Pope's, that of the most execrable of all coats, cocked-hats, and waistcoats, -lumpish, formal, and useless; a miserable affectation of ease with the most ridiculous buckram. And yet the costume of part of George the Third's reign was perhaps worse. for it had not even the garnish; it was the extreme of mechanical dulness: and the women had preposterous tresses of curls and pomatum on their head, by way of setting off the extremity of dull plainness with that of dull caprice. For the hoop, possibly, something may be said, not as a dress, nor as an investment, but as an enclosure. It did not seem so much to disfigure as to contain the wearer, to be not a dress, but a .gilding shell. The dancers at Otaheite, in the pictures to Captain Cook's voyages, have some such lower houses; and look well in them for the same reason. The body issued from the hoop, as out of a sea of flounce and furbelow. It was the next thing to a nymph half hidden in water. The arm and fan reposed upon it as upon a cloud or a moving sphere;

the fair angel looking serene and superior above it. Thus much we would say in defence of the hoop, properly so called, when it was in its perfection, large and circular, and to be approached like a "hedge of divinity," or the walls of Troy,—

"Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious petticoat ;”

not for those mashed and minor shapes of the phenomenon, which degenerated into mere appendages, panniers, or side lumps, and reminded you of nothing but their deformity. But it was always a thing fantastic, and fit only for court and ceremony.

Mr. Planché justly cautions one generation against laughing at the fashions of another. He advises such ladies as would "scream" at the dresses of the fourteenth or even eighteenth century, to look into a fashionable pocket-book or magazine for the year 1815 or 20, and then candidly compare notes. Appendages or enclosures are one thing; positive, clinging disfigurements, another. The ugliest female dress, in our opinion, without exception, was that which we conceive Mr. Planché to allude to; and which confounded all ages and shapes by girdling the gown under the arm-pits, and sticking a little pad at the pack, almost between the shoulders! It reduced all figures to lumps of absurdity. No well-shaped woman, we may be sure, invented it. A history of the real origin of many fashions would be a curious document. We should find infirmity and unsightliness cheating youth and beauty into an imitation of them, and beaux and belles piquing themselves on resembling the worst points about their cunning elders.

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As long as a man wears the modern coat, he has no right to despise any dress. What a thing it is, though so often taken for something "exquisite"! What a horse-collar for a collar! What snips at the collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridiculous cut about the flaps! What buttons in front that are never meant to button, and yet are no ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair of buttons at the back! gravely regarded nevertheless, and thought as indispensably necessary to every well-conditioned coat, as other bits of metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of sense, grace, or even economy, in the modern coat. It is an article as costly as it is ugly, and as ugly as it is useless. In winter it is not enough, and in hot weather it is too much. It is the tailors' remnant and cabbaging of the coats formerly in use, and deserves only to be chucked back to them an imposition in the bill. It is the old or frock coat, cut away in front and at the sides, mounted with a horse-collar, and left with a ridiculous tail. The waistcoat or vest, elongated, and with the addition of sleeves, might supersede it at once, and be quite sufficient in warm weather. A vest reaching to the mid-thigh is a graceful and reasonable habit, and, with the addition of a scarf or sash, would make as handsome or even brilliant a one as anybody could desire. In winter-time, the same cloaks would do for it as are used now; and there might be lighter cloaks for summer. But the coat, as it now exists, is a mere nuisance and expense, and disgraces every other part of the dress, except the neck-cloth. Even the hat is

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