who may be, if they will, the most vivid historians of all in the matter of clothes, are divided upon the subject. Kemble, when he played Hamlet, wore a Riband and powdered his hair, not because he supposed that powder and jewelled Orders were in fashion at the Court of Claudius, King of Denmark, but because a Prince, in the costume in which they were accustomed to see Princes, appealed more forcibly to his audience. (Mrs. Aria contributes this information; it is not borne out by the full-length portrait of Kemble as "Hamlet.") Macready, on the other hand, used to sleep in his armor, before he played Henry V., that he might wear it without the least suspicion of clumsiness.

Coiffure again is a curious thing. For a hundred years or more the hair of women was never seen in England. When they found out that, after all, it was a pleasing sight, they disposed of it in two long plaits, they crushed it into nets and bags, at last they hid it away again under enormous horns and caps the shape of a church steeple. They showed their taste for adventure perhaps, their sympathy with Crusading husbands, in the pellisse, imitated from the coats worn by the ladies of Persia. Queen Elizabeth, who wore so many strange clothes herself, was good enough to make a number of laws for other people about them:

How often hath her majestie with the grave advice of her honorable Councel, sette down the limits of apparell to every degree, and how soon again hath the pride of our harts overflowen the chanell!

At one time, shoemakers who made long-toed shoes for any under the rank of a yeoman were cursed by the clergy. The pot-hat may be seen in the cartoon of "St. Paul preaching at Athens"; and the reason why it is not seen (how odd the reasons of things

are!) is that Raphael colored it vermilion. Nobody cursed that.

When Cupid first beheld a woman, according to the author of the Roxburghe Ballads,

He prankt it up in Fardingals and Muffs,

In Masks, Rebatos, Shapperowns, and Wyers,

In Paintings, Powd'rings, Perriwigs, and Cuffes,

In Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French attires;

Thus was it born, brought forth, and made Love's baby,

And this is that which now we call a Lady.

That is all very well. It is an earlier variant of a song that charmed us all a few years ago:

Just look at that, just look at this! I really think I'm not amiss!

In between comes another sweet echo:

My high commode, my damask gown,
My lac'd shoes of Spanish leather,
A silver bodkin in my head,

And a dainty plume of feather.

The other side of the picture is given by the Knight of La Tour Landry, a model father of the fourteenth century, who, wishing to keep his daughters from extravagance, told them the awful story of a gentleman, who lost his wife and went to "an heremyte hys uncle" to know whether she was saved or not, and how "it stode with her." Then the hermit told her he had seen in a dream

Seint Michelle and the devell that had her in a balaunce, and alle her good dedes in the same balaunce, and a develle and all her evelle dedes in that other balaunce. And the most that grevid her was her good and gay clothing, and furres of gray minevere and letuse; and the develle cried and sayde, Seint Michel, this woman had tenne diverse gownes and as mani

Jean de Meum, too, is very severe:"I know not whether they call gibbets or corbels that which sustains their horns, which they consider so fine, but I venture to say that St. Elizabeth is not in Paradise for having carried such baubles."

world The fashions of the social change, and their very names change and are forgotten. Wimples, coifs, cascanets, carkenels, fusles, frislets, palisadoes, who cares about them any more? Who, when he walks down Piccadilly, thinks of the shop where charming bands, trimmed with lace and called peccadilles, were sold to the dandies? "Caskades of ribands" have had their day. The thirty-two ways of tying a cravat have given place to the thirty-third. We are sober enough now; our very extravagance is dull. The Times.

We do not dress our hair à la guillotine, nor carry ships of the line on top of it. We do not suffer to be fair. Something, however, we mean by dress, whether we know it or not; at least as much as did our ancestors. Fantastic ideals of beauty and stateliness move us no longer. To see a little Blue Coat boy about the streets, or an old pensioner of the gay Lord Leicester with his Bear and his Ragged Staff, is to see something that we gaze upon fondly, but without understanding. We have begun to study the safety and the health even of those on whom our own safety depends, even of soldiers, even of children.

All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own ac count; strictly taken, is not there at all. Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea and body it forth. Hence clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want.

M.

one franc Maupassant's, Ohnet's, Theuriet's, and other works; Messrs. Calmann Lévy are offering at 95 centimes an illustrated edition of their best authors such as "Pêcheur d'Islande," by Pierre Loti, and "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard," by Anatole France. Ernest Flammarion prints a like collection, and it is said that a popular daily paper, with a circulation of one million and a half, is buying copyrights in order to launch a similar series, including not only reprints but new books.

In "The Port of Missing Men" Meredith Nicholson ingeniously uses the clouds which have hung over the succession in Austria as a background for a clever and readable story of presentday adventure. His hero, John Armitage, of parentage unknown, owner of large ranching interests in Montana, but often mistaken for an Englishman, and more conversant with Continental intrigue than seems consistent with either character, is in possession of documents proving the death of two members of the Austrian house, and the efforts of conspirators in the pay of a third to get possession of them, together with the mystery which surrounds his own identity, shape a plot whose scene shifts from Geneva to Washington, D.C., and then to the Virginia mountains. The piquant daughter of an American jurist furnishes the romantic interest. The story does not tax the reader's credulity more than the conventions of the current historical novel allow, and it is well told, lively, entertaining, and wholesome. The Bobbs-Merrill Co.

The subject of Alice C. C. Gaussen's "A Woman of Wit and Wisdom" is Elizabeth Carter, whose long life spanned nearly the whole of the eighteenth century, and whose vivacity, wit and brilliant conversa

cen

tional the made her powers tre of a literary and social circle of more than ordinary influence. She wrote verse; she translated Epictetus, which was for those days a marvelous achievement for feminine talent; she numbered among her friends Dr. Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Mrs. Montagu and a host beside; she would have nothing to do with matrimony, but her home at Deal was a meetingplace for many congenial spirits; and she left a multitude of letters, notes and other memorials which, with the numerous contemporary tributes to her charms and accomplishments furnish abundant material for a diverting study of English life and society in the eighteenth century. Her portrait, as it looks out upon the reader from the frontispiece, fully justifies Miss Gaussen's characterization of her. There are other portraits and a facsimile of her handwriting. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The London Times announces that the Cambridge University Press will shortly publish in two volumes, the "Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the late Sir George Gabriel Stokes," selected and arranged by Professor Joseph Larmor, who edited the last two volumes of the collected edition of Sir George Stokes's "Mathematical and Physical Papers." The personal memoir is by Sir George Stokes's daughter, Mrs. Laurence Humphry, who includes numerous extracts from letters written by her father to his future wife at the time of their engagement. "The letters," explains Mrs. Humphry, "were so unlike ordinary love-letters, so dignified and impersonal in their expression, that, written, as he said, to explain his character, they must be of legitimate interest to others as containing the only self-revelation that he apparently ever consciously made." One of these love-letters, it seems, in

cluded fifty-five pages about his scientific pre-occupations, and it is not surprising to learn that it almost led to the termination of the engagement. In addition to the memoir by Mrs. Humphry there are appreciations by Sir George Stokes's colleagues-Professor E. D. Liveing, Sir Michael Foster, Sir W. Huggins, and the Bishop of Bristol.

The Academy reports that Oxford, following the example of Sherborne and Warwick, is to have her Pageant this summer; and it says of the preparations:

The time chosen is Commemorationweek, that June festival which annually drives the shy don to seek his peace elsewhere. Among the promoters and organizers of the Pageant "all the (Oxford) talents" are to be found. both those who linger, like Mr. Godley. in her courts, and those who, like Mr. Anthony Hope, once sojourned there. The Pageant is to represent some of the most stirring scenes in the life of the University and City, from the legend of St. Frideswide to the reception of the Allied Sovereigns at the Commemoration of 1814. St. Frideswide's story will be followed by the burning of her church, which was set on fire to destroy the unfortunate Danes who had incurred the displeasure of Ethelred the Unready. Other episodes presented will be the incident of Fair Rosamund, the famous riots of St. Scholastica's Day, when the "gown" came off so badly, the reception of various Sovereigns, Amy Robsart's funeral, the surrender of the City to the Parliamentarians, and the expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen by James II. As King Charles I. and his Queen are to arrive by water, it is to be presumed that the Pageant will be played in some meadow bordering the Isis. Alfred the Great, it is to be feared, will not put in an appearance. It is, indeed, chastening to be reminded that our oldest University originated from the arrival of a band of foreign scholars.