ust have gone slopping and spirting about in the mud that
befouled their streets as well as ours! What queer figures they must
have cut on horseback in a rainy day, with the water running off from
the pendulous tips of their shoes! Nevertheless, there was something
good in the arrangement of the upper part of the shoe or half-boot of
those times, and even of earlier days, as any one who reads the
_Art-Union_, or who knows the history of British costume, can tell. It
formed an appropriate termination to the tightly-dressed limb; and when
not too much pointed, prolonged the natural shape of the foot into a
gracefully-curving support. Shoes, in the present sense of the term,
were not then worn: every thing was limited to the elastic half-boots:
but for the huntsman or the horseman, not armed for the tented field, a
sort of brown leather boot coming up to the knee was in common use. This
had no falling tops, and was far removed from the ridiculous Spanish
boot of after days. It was a plain and useful servant to the cavalier,
and became him much better than the ponderous jack-boot of later times.
It is to the Spaniards that we are indebted, if "indebted" be a suitable
term, for the wide-topped falling boot of the sixteenth century; that
inconvenient, no-service thing--good for the stage-players, fancy-ball
men, and fellows like old Hudibras, who crammed a portable larder and
wardrobe into its unfathomable recesses; but for the rough-riding
horseman or the active hunter, a nuisance beyond all description. Boots
such as these may look admirably well in pictures; for when delineated
by a Vandyke, any thing would become graceful; but for actual practice,
they would serve only to catch the rain, and to gall the legs of the
wearer. Their descendant, the top-boot, has reformed itself wonderfully,
and nearly all the inconvenience has been got rid of. Still, the brown
colour of the top, which is no longer the inside of the boot turned
down, as it was once, is an anomaly, and the boot itself ought to be
merged in the plain single-coloured boot which is now much used on the
Continent, though in England patronized only by the Meltonians. For
positive use, the boot ought to come up fully to, or above, the knee, in
order to stand the wear and pressure of the saddle; but for ornament, it
may well be allowed to rise only partially up the leg, and to be, in
short, the beautiful Hessian or Hungarian boot--far the most graceful
covering ever put