ed modes of Raleigh, Walsingham,
and Shakspeare, and heroical Edward the Black Prince, and venerable
apostolic Bede, we will encroach little further than to discard our
comfortless starched collars and strangling stocks, to adopt once more
in lieu thereof open necks and vandyke borders.

Of course, (here, priest-like, we take our ell,) there must follow upon
this a grand and glorious revolution in male attire. This present
close-fitting, undignified set of habiliments, which no chisel dare
imitate--this cumbersome, unbecoming garb--might, should, ought to be,
and would be, superseded by slashed gay jerkins, and picturesque nether
garments: cap and feather throwing into shade the modern hat, ugliest
of all imaginable head-dresses; and in lieu of the smock-frock
Macintosh, or coarse-featured bear-skin, Ciceronian mantles flowing from
the shoulders, or lighter capes of the elegant olden-time Venitian. By
way of distinguishing the now confused classes of society, my radical
reform in dress would go to recommend that nobles and gentry wear their
own heraldic colours and livery buttons; and humbler domesticated
creatures walk, as modest gentlefolks do now, in what sundry have
presumed to call "Mufti." To be briefer; in dress, if nothing more, let
us sensibly retrograde to the days of good Queen Bess: I will not say,
copy a Sir Piercie Shafton, who boasts of having "danced the salvage man
at the mummery of Clerkenwell, in a suit of flesh-coloured silk, trimmed
with fur;" neither, under these dingy skies, would I care to walk abroad
with Sir Philip Sidney in satin boots, or with Oliver Goldsmith in a
peach-coloured doublet: but still, for very comfort's sake, let us break
our bonds of cloth and buckram, and, in so far as adornment is
concerned, let us exchange this staid funeral monotony for the gallant
garb of our ancestors, the brave costumes of our Edwards and the bluff
King Hal.

Behold, too scornful friend, how my Tory rabies reaches to the wardrobe.
The modern dress of illuminated Europe has, in my humble opinion, gone
far to weaken the old empire of the Porte, to denationalize Egypt, to
degenerate the Jews, to mammonize once generous Greece, and carry
republican equality into the great prairies of America: it is the
undistinguishing, humiliating, unchivalrous livery of our cold
cosmopolites. But enough of this: pews and spires are to my Quixotism
not more unextinguishable foes, than coats, cravats, waistcoats, and
unna