ued, received unexpected consummation in high-heeled
shoes and periwigs,--Gower Street, and Gaspar Poussin.[116]

Reaction from this state was inevitable, if any true life was left in
the races of mankind; and, accordingly, though still forced, by rule
and fashion, to the producing and wearing all that is ugly, men steal
out, half-ashamed of themselves for doing so, to the fields and
mountains; and, finding among these the colour, and liberty, and
variety, and power, which are for ever grateful to them, delight in
these to an extent never before known; rejoice in all the wildest
shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to Gower Street,
gaze in a rapt manner at sunsets and sunrises, to see there the blue,
and gold, and purple, which glow for them no longer on knight's armour
or temple porch; and gather with care out of the fields, into their
blotted herbaria, the flowers which the five orders of architecture
have banished from their doors and casements.

The absence of care for personal beauty, which is another great
characteristic of the age, adds to this feeling in a twofold way:
first, by turning all reverent thoughts away from human nature; and
making us think of men as ridiculous or ugly creatures, getting
through the world as well as they can, and spoiling it in doing so;
not ruling it in a kingly way and crowning all its loveliness. In the
Middle Ages hardly anything but vice could be caricatured, because
virtue was always visibly and personally noble: now virtue itself is
apt to inhabit such poor human bodies, that no aspect of it is
invulnerable to jest; and for all fairness we have to seek to the
flowers, for all sublimity, to the hills.

The same want of care operates, in another way, by lowering the
standard of health, increasing the susceptibility to nervous or
sentimental impressions, and thus adding to the other powers of nature
over us whatever charm may be felt in her fostering the melancholy
fancies of brooding idleness.

It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of
beauty in person and dress has driven us. The imagination of it, as it
was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually; and while we yield
to the present fashions, or act in accordance with the dullest modern
principles of economy and utility, we look fondly back to the manners
of the ages of chivalry, and delight in painting, to the fancy, the
fashions we pretend to despise, and the splendours we thin