ost
as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet
Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear
it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a
splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a
result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember
that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was
that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that
might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig
returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in
_The Rivals_ there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was
never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it
began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not
a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which
set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of
the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When
Lady Percy in _Henry IV._ is lamenting Hotspur she says:--

... he was, indeed, the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs that practised not his gait;
And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant;
For those that could speak low and tardily,
Would turn their own perfection to abuse.
To seem like him.

In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of
the war. The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things
and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the
top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield. I don't
think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there
were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But,
perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war
as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had
better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable
change. Let us enjoy it without boasting.

Our enjoyment may be short-lived. We must not be surprised if this
incredible hat returns in triumph with peace. It has survived the blasts of
many centuries and infinite changes of fa