shion. It is, I suppose, the most
ancient survival in the dress that men wear. There is in the Froissart
collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth
century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the
Barbary corsairs. And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour.
They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats! And it may be
that when Macaulay's New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he will sit
under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.

There must be some virtue in a thing that is so immortal. If the doctrine
of the survival of the fittest applies to dress, it is the fittest thing we
have. Trousers are a thing of yesterday with us, but our top-hat carries us
back to the Wars of the Roses and beyond. It is not its beauty that
explains it. I have never heard any one deny that it is ugly, though custom
may have blunted our sense of its ugliness. It is not its utility. I have
never heard any one claim that this strange cylinder had that quality. It
is not its comfort It is stiff, it is heavy, it is unmanageable in a wind
and ruined by a shower of rain. It needs as much attention as a peevish
child or a pet dog. It is not even cheap, and when it is disreputable it is
the most disreputable thing on earth. What is the mystery of its strange
persistence? Is it simply a habit that we cannot throw off or is there a
certain snobbishness about it that appeals to the flunkeyism of men? That
is perhaps the explanation. That is perhaps why it has disappeared when
snobbishness is felt to be inconsistent with the world of stern realities
and bitter sorrows in which we live. We are humble and serious and out of
humour with the pretentious vanity of our top-hat.

ON LOSING ONE'S MEMORY

The case of the soldier in the Keighley Hospital who has lost his memory in
the war and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a
Yorkshireman, and so on is one of the most singular personal incidents of
the war. On the face of it it would seem impossible that a mother should
not know her own son, or a brother his brother. Yet in this case it is
clear that some of the claimants are mistaken. The incident is not, of
course, without precedent. The most notorious case of the sort was that of
Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in