he
dreamy, romantic landscapes which back the figures of Giorgione; and
it is not easy to think of these people of the Henry VI. period
without placing them against conventional tapestry trees, yellow-white
castles with red, pepper-pot roofs, grass luxuriant with needlework
flowers, and all the other accessories of the art.

[Illustration: {A man of the time of Henry VI.}]

The early times are easily imagined in rough surroundings or in open
air; knights in armour ride quite comfortably down modern English
lanes. Alfred may burn his cakes realistically, and Canute rebuke his
courtiers on the beach--these one may see in the round. Elizabeth
rides to Tilbury, Charles II. casts his horoscope, and George rings
the bell, each in their proper atmosphere, but the Dark Ages are dark,
not only in modes of thought, but in being ages of grotesque, of
ornamentation, of anything but realism.

One has, I think, a conventional mind's eye for the times from Edward
I. to Richard III., from 1272 to 1485, and it is really more easy for
a Chinaman to call up a vision of 604 A.D., when Laot-sen, the Chinese
philosopher, was born. Laot-sen, the child-old man, he who was born
with white hair, lived till he was eighty-one, and, having had five
million followers, went up to heaven on a black buffalo. In China
things have changed very little: the costume is much the same, the
customs are the same, the attitude towards life has not changed. But
here the semicivilized, superstitious, rather dirty, fourteenth and
fifteenth century person has gone. Scratch a Russian, they say, and
you will see a Tartar; do the same office by an Englishman, and you
may find a hint of the Renaissance under his skin, but no more. The
Middle Ages are dead and dust.

We will proceed with that congenial paradox which states that the seat
of learning lies in the head, and so discuss the most distinctive
costumery of this time, the roundlet.

[Illustration: {A man of the time of Henry VI.; two types of
head-gear}]

Now, the roundlet is one of those things which delight the
clothes-hunter or the costume expert. It is the natural result of a
long series of fashions for the head, and its pedigree is free from
any impediment or hindrance; it is the great-grandson of the hood,
which is derived from a fold in a cloak, which is the beginning of all
things.

I am about to run the risk of displeasure in repeating to some extent
what I have already written about t