erfect friendship was unmarred by
rivalry because, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they were of such
different but equally engaging types of manly beauty. I forget whether
they married sisters, but they live on in the memory as ornamental
symbols of a vanished past--a day when fiction-writers impressed it, on
their readers with every means at their command, that a hero was
well-dressed, well-washed, and well-groomed. Such details have become
unnecessary, and grumpy stand-patters no longer contemptuously mutter,
'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our older
politicians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albert
coat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and an
impersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what used
jocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders go
appropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear
clothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, rising like
an escaped balloon from his once precarious place among the untrained
workers to the comfortable security of general manager. Here and there,
an echo of the past, persists the pretence that men are superior to any
but practical considerations in respect to clothing; but if this were
so, I need hardly point out that more would dress like Dr. Jaeger, and
few waste precious moments fussing over the selection of prettily
colored ribbons to wear round their necks.

Fortunately we need no valets, and a democracy of best-dressers is
neither more nor less democratic than one of shirt-sleeves: the
important thing in both cases is that the great majority of citizens all
look alike. The alarm-clock awakens us, less politely than a James or
Joseph, but we need never suspect it of uncomplimentary mental
reservations, and neither its appetite nor its morals cause us
uneasiness. Fellow-citizens of Greek extraction maintain parlors where
we may sit, like so many statues on the Parthenon, while they polish our
shoes. In all large cities are quiet retreats where it is quite
conventional, and even _degage_, for the most Perfect Gentleman to wait
in what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow creature swiftly
presses his trousers; or, lacking this convenient retreat, there are
shrewd inventions that crease while we sleep. Hangers, simulating our
own breadth of shoulders, wear our coats and preserve their shape.
Wooden feet, simulating our own hones