no meaning at all; as
if the breaking waves of fashion which carry with them the record
of pride and gentleness, of distinction and folly, of the rising and
shattering of ideals,--"the cut which betokens intellect and talent,
the colour which betokens temper and heart,"--were guided by no other
law than chance, were a mere purposeless tyranny. Historians dwell
upon the mad excesses of ruff and farthingale, of pointed shoe and
swelling skirt, as if these things stood for nothing in a society
forever alternating between rigid formalism and the irrepressible
spirit of democracy.

Is it possible to look at a single costume painted by Velasquez
without realizing that the Spanish court under Philip the Fourth had
lost the mobility which has characterized it in the days of Ferdinand
and Isabella, and had hardened into a formalism, replete with dignity,
but lacking intelligence, and out of touch with the great social
issues of the day? French chroniclers have written page after page
of description--aimless and tiresome description, for the most
part--of those amazing head-dresses which, at the court of Marie
Antoinette, rose to such heights that the ladies looked as if their
heads were in the middle of their bodies. They stood seven feet high
when their hair was dressed, and a trifle over five when it wasn't.
The Duchesse de Lauzun wore upon one memorable occasion a head-dress
presenting a landscape in high relief on the shore of a stormy lake,
ducks swimming on the lake, a sportsman shooting at the ducks, a mill
which rose from the crown of her head, a miller's wife courted by
an abbe, and a miller placidly driving his donkey down the steep
incline over the lady's left ear.

It sounds like a Christmas pantomime; but when we remember that the
French court, that model of patrician pride, was playing with
democracy, with republicanism, with the simple life, as presented
by Rousseau to its consideration, we see plainly enough how the real
self-sufficiency of caste and the purely artificial sentiment of the
day found expression in absurdities of costume. Women dared to wear
such things, because, being aristocrats, they felt sure of
themselves: and they professed to admire them, because, being
engulfed in sentiment, they had lost all sense of proportion. A
miller and his donkey were rustic (Marie Antoinette adored
rusticity); an abbe flirting with a miller's wife was as obviously
artificial as Watteau. It would have been hard to