rous even for an Englishman than to
travel in Africa to-day; for a foreigner the adventure was indeed
environed by perils.

[Sidenote: 1761--Fashions under George the Third]

Dress and manners had changed in the Hanoverian half-century, though
not as much as they were to change in the fifty years that were still
in futurity. Extravagance of attire still persisted, though the
extravagance had changed its expression. The gigantic hoops in which
ladies had delighted had diminished, had dwindled, and gowns were of a
slender seemliness. But reformed below, fantasy rioted above. The
headdresses of women in the early days of the third George were as
monstrous, as horrible, and as shapeless in their way as the hideous
hoops had been in theirs. Vast pyramids of false hair were piled on
the heads of fashionable ladies, were pasted together with pomatums,
{17} were smothered in powder and pricked with feathers like the
headgear of a savage. These odious erections took so long to build up
that they were suffered to remain in their ugly entirety not for days
but for weeks together, until the vast structure became a decomposing
mass. It is rather ghastly to remember that youth and beauty and grace
allowed itself to be so loathsomely adorned, that the radiant women
whose faces smile from the canvases of great painters, and whose names
illuminate the chronicles of the wasted time of the reign of George the
Third, were condemned to dwell with corruption in consenting to be
caricatured. Till far on in the lifetime of Queen Charlotte the
fashion in women's wear oscillated from one extreme to another, the
gracious of to-day becoming the grotesque of yesterday, and mode
succeeding mode with the confusion and fascination of a masquerade.

The men were no less remarkable than the women for the clothes they
wore, no less capricious in their changes. A decided, if not a
conspicuous, turn of public taste had done much since the accession of
the first George to minimize if not to obliterate the differences
between class and class. Men no longer consented readily to carry the
badge of their calling in their daily costume, and the great world came
gradually to be no longer divided sharply from the little world by
marked distinction of dress. But still, and for long after 1760, the
clothes of men were scarcely less brilliant, scarcely less importunate
in their demands upon the attention of their wearers, than the clothes
of women. Men