y and the impermanence of all caprices.

Within the last century, men have gradually, and it would seem
permanently, abandoned the effort to reveal their personality in
dress. They have allowed themselves to be committed for life to a
costume of ruthless utilitarianism, which takes no count of physical
beauty, or of its just display. Comfort, convenience, and sanitation
have conspired to establish a rigidity of rule never seen before,
to which men yield a docile and lamblike obedience. Robert Burton's
axiom, "Nothing sooner dejects a man than clothes out of fashion,"
is as true now as it was three hundred years ago. Fashion sways the
shape of a collar, and the infinitesimal gradations of a hat-brim;
but the sense of fitness, and the power of interpreting life, which
ennobled fashion in Burton's day, have disappeared in an enforced
monotony.

Men take a strange perverted pride in this mournful sameness of
attire,--delight in wearing a hat like every other man's hat, are
content that it should be a perfected miracle of ugliness, that it
should be hot, that it should be heavy, that it should be disfiguring,
if only they can make sure of seeing fifty, or a hundred and fifty,
other hats exactly like it on their way downtown. So absolute is this
uniformity that the late Marquess of Ailesbury bore all his life a
reputation for eccentricity, which seems to have had no other
foundation than the fact of his wearing hats, or rather a hat, of
distinctive shape, chosen with reference to his own head rather than
to the heads of some odd millions of fellow citizens. The story is
told of his standing bare-headed in a hatter's shop, awaiting the
return of a salesman who had carried off his own beloved head-gear,
when a shortsighted bishop entered, and, not recognizing the peer,
took him for an assistant, and handed him _his_ hat, asking him if
he had any exactly like it. Lord Ailesbury turned the bishop's hat
over and over, examined it carefully inside and out, and gave it back
again. "No," he said, "I haven't, and I'll be damned if I'd wear it,
if I had."

Even before the establishment of the invincible despotism which
clothes the gentlemen of Christendom in a livery, we find the
masculine mind disposed to severity in the ruling of fashions. Steele,
for example, tells us the shocking story of an English gentleman who
would persist in wearing a broad belt with a hanger, instead of the
light sword then carried by men of rank, althoug