ments. I have gone to bed Georgian and awoken Early
Victorian. Even savagery has charmed me. And at such times I have often
wished I could find in my wardrobe suitable costumes. But these modish
regrets are sterile, after all, and comprimend. What boots it to defy
the conventions of our time? The dandy is the 'child of his age,'
and his best work must be produced in accord with the ages natural
influence. The true dandy must always love contemporary costume. In this
age, as in all precedent ages, it is only the tasteless who cavil, being
impotent to win from it fair results. How futile their voices are!
The costume of the nineteenth century, as shadowed for us first by
Mr. Brummell, so quiet, so reasonable, and, I say emphatically, so
beautiful; free from folly or affectation, yet susceptible to exquisite
ordering; plastic, austere, economical, may not be ignored. I spoke of
the doom of swift rebellions, but I doubt even if any soever gradual
evolution will lead us astray from the general precepts of Mr.
Brummell's code. At every step in the progress of democracy those
precepts will be strengthened. Every day their fashion is more secure,
corroborate. They are acknowledged by the world. The barbarous costumes
that in bygone days were designed by class-hatred, or hatred of race,
are dying, very surely dying. The costermonger with his pearl-emblazoned
coat has been driven even from that Variety Stage, whereon he sought
a desperate sanctuary. The clinquant corslet of the Swiss girl just
survives at bals costumes. I am told that the kilt is now confined
entirely to certain of the soldiery and to a small cult of Scotch
Archaicists. I have seen men flock from the boulevards of one capital
and from the avenues of another to be clad in Conduit Street. Even
into Oxford, that curious little city, where nothing is ever born nor
anything ever quite dies, the force of the movement has penetrated,
insomuch that tasselled cap and gown of degree are rarely seen in the
streets or colleges. In a place which was until recent times scarcely
less remote, Japan, the white and scarlet gardens are trod by men who
are shod in boots like our own, who walk--rather strangely still--in
close-cut cloth of little colour, and stop each other from time to time,
laughing to show how that they too can furl an umbrella after the manner
of real Europeans.

It is very nice, this universal acquiescence in the dress we have
designed, but, if we reflect, not w