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dagger will come up; then a good tall sword-and-buckler man will be spitted like a cat or a rabbit." Fig. 7 is one of the pole-axes of the guard of Queen Elizabeth, preserved in the Tower Armoury (where specimens of all these implements may be seen): it is an adaptation of the spear and horseman's hammer, for the use of the infantry.

The collection of Lord Londesborough furnishes us with the annexed excellent specimen of a buckler, entirely formed of steel. The inner side is represented for the sake of showing the hook by which it was suspended to the waist; and the handle which crossed the boss in the centre. It is but one foot in diameter; and was held at arm's-length to parry a blow, as will be best understood by a reference to the illustrations to the word Buckler in the Glossary of this volume.

Such were the more important military novelties of the Tudor era. Fire-arms will come in for a full share of attention during the next period, by which time they may be considered as having reached a high degree of perfection. A lavish amount of decoration was bestowed on such as were used by the nobility. The stocks of guns were inlaid with ivory, gold, and silver ornaments, or sculptured in relief with stories from classic history, or mythology. The utmost luxury of art was also displayed in armour; suits were sometimes embossed and chased with groups of figures or ornament, and inlaid with decoration in the precious metals of elaborate design, produced by channelling the surface and beating thin strips of gold and silver into the grooves. So valuable were the suits of Knights and Nobles that they ran a new risk in the battle-field, the risk of being killed that their armour might be sold as plunder. When it was about to be discarded, owing to improved fire-arms, its dying splendour blazed forth in greater brilliancy than at any other time.

234

The Stuarts.

THE accession of King James I. interfered in no degree with the costume of the country. That monarch had, in fact, more luxuries to conform to than introduce; yet it had perhaps been well for the country if he had in this matter interfered more, and in graver ones less; as his ruling desire to be considered the "British Solomon," a character posterity has laughed away from him, did infinitely more mischief by the solemn foolery of inundating the land with pedantic jargon, than all the tailors and milliners of France could have done, had they come over in a body, shears in hand, to trim awkward Englishmen into shapes the most preposterous that fashion could invent. James's cowardice, among his other failings, made it a matter of solicitude with him to guard his person, at all times unwieldy, with quilted and padded clothing, so that it might be ever dagger-proof. It was so far fortunate, for a man of his idle turn, that he needed no innovation of a striking kind to indulge in this costume; for the stuffed and padded dresses that had become fashionable in the reign of Elizabeth continued to be worn in all their full-blown importance; the sumptuary laws, which had always proved singularly inefficient, were all, with one exception, repealed in the beginning of this reign; and this single exception soon sharing the fate of the rest, laws of this kind have ever been deemed too contemptible and impolitic to be again introduced into the British code.

A Jewell for Gentrie appeared in 1614, in the shape of a goodly volume devoted to hunting and other fashionable methods of killing time; and it was decorated with a full-length figure of James and attendants hawking, from which the following copy of his Majesty was executed. "The great, round, abominable breech," as the satirists term it, now tapered down to the knee, and was slashed all over, and covered with lace and embroidery. Stays were sometimes worn beneath the long-waisted doublets of the gentlemen, to keep

them straight, and confine the waist.* The king's hat is of the new

est and most improved fa

shion, and not much unlike

those worn but a few years ago; it has a feather at its side, and it was not uncommon to decorate the stems of these feathers with jewels, or to insert a group of them in a diamond ornament worn in the centre of the hat; and hatbands, richly decorated with valuable stones, were also frequently seen; or a single pearl was hung from a centre ornament that secured the upturned brim.

Dekker, in his Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, 1606, says: "An Englishman's suit is like a traitor's body that hath been hanged, drawn, and quartered, and set up in

several places: the collar of his doublet and the belly in France; the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy; the short waist hangs over a Dutch botcher's stall in Utrich; his huge sloppes speakes Spanish; Polonia gives him the bootes; the blocke for his head alters faster than the feltmaker can fit him, and thereupon we are called in scorne blockheads. And thus we, that mocke every nation for keeping one fashion, yet steale patches from every one of them to piece out our pride, are now laughing-stocks to them, because their cut so scurvily becomes us." And in Greene's Farewell to Folly, 1591, he says: "I have seen an English gentlemen so diffused in his suits,-his doublet being for the weare of Castile, his hose for Venise, his hat for France, his cloak for Germanie,-that he seemed no way to be an Englishman but by the face."

In Marston's comedy What you Will, 1607, a serving-man thus enumerates a gentleman's wardrobe: "A cloak lined with rich taf

Sir Walter Raleigh, who combined an excess of dandyism with a mind immeasurably superior to that of the majority of fashionables, is delineated in a waist that might excite the envy of the most stanch advocate for this baneful fashion. (See Lodge's Portraits.)

feta, a white satin suit, the jerkin covered with gold lace, a chain of pearl, a gilt rapier in an embroidered hanger, pearl-coloured silk stockings, and a pair of massive silver spurs." The taste for purewhite dresses of silk velvet or cloth was prevalent at this time. Horace Walpole had at Strawberry Hill a full-length portrait of Lord Falkland entirely dressed in white; and at Lullingstone, Kent, is still preserved a full-length of Sir G. Hart, 1600, who is also entirely in white, even to his shoes, the only bit of colour in his costume being their red heels.

The fashionable novelties of dress are again given by Dekker in his Gull's Horn-book, 1609, in a passage where the simplicity of old times is contrasted with the new: "There was then neither the Spanish slop, nor the skipper's galligaskins; the Danish sleeving, sagging down like a Welsh wallet, the Italian's close strosser, nor the French standing collar; your treble-quadruple-dedalian ruffs, nor your stiff-necked rabatos, that have more arches for pride to row under than can stand under five London bridges, durst not then set themselves out in print; for the patent for starch could by no means be signed. Fashions then was counted a disease, and horses died of it."

Henry Fitzgeffery, in his satirical Notes from Black Fryers, 1617, describing the visitors to that favourite place of amusement, asks—

"Know'st thou yon world of fashions now comes in,

In turkie colours carved to the skin;

Mounted Polonianly till he reeles,*

That scorns so much plain dealing at his heeles.
His boote speaks Spanish to his Scottish spurs ;
His sute cut Frenchly, rounde bestucke with burres;
Pure Holland is his shirt, which, proudly faire,
Seems to outface his doublet everywhere
His haire like to your Moores or Irish lockes;

His chiefest dyet Indian mixed dockes.†

What country May-game might wee this suppose?
Sure one would think a Roman, by his nose.

No! in his habit better understand,

Hee is of England, by his yellow band."

And he elsewhere describes a 66

spruse coxcombe,"

"That never walkes without his looking-glasse

In a tobacco-box or diall set,

That he may privately conferre with it,
How his band iumpeth with his peccadilly,

i. e. on high-heeled shoes.

+ Tobacco.

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The fondness of ladies for painting their faces and exposing their breasts, was severely reprimanded by the divines and satirists in the early part of the seventeenth century. Dr. John Hall, in an appen dix to his small volume against long hair, discourses in unmeasured terms on "the vanities and exorbitances of many women, in painting, patching, spotting, and blotting themselves," declaring it to be "the badge of an harlot; rotten posts are painted, and gilded nutmegs are usually the worst." The portraits of noble ladies, in the reign of James, some of which may be seen in Nicholl's account of the Progresses of that monarch, will sufficiently show how obtrusively immodest the fashion of exposing the naked breast had become. While a ruffe, or band of immoderate size stretched forth from the neck, the front of the dress was cut away immediately beneath it nearly to the waist, which made the fashion more noticeable, as all the other part of the bust was over-cloathed, while the bosom was perfectly bare.

The full-length portraits of the Earl and Countess of Somerset, for ever rendered infamous by their connection with the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and which are here engraved from the rare contemporary print, will well display the points that marked the costume of the nobility about the middle of James's reign. The Earl's hat and ruff are unpretending and plain; but his doublet exhibits the effect of tight-lacing, while his trunk-hose, richly embroidered, strut out conspicuously beneath. His gar

ters, which at this peried took the form of a sash tied in a bow at the side of the leg, have rich point-lace ends; and his equally gorgeous shoe-roses call to mind the lament in Friar Bacon's Prophesie, 1604:

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