a thing so manifestly careless and
informal that the school-master, Kroll, is scandalized at seeing
Rebecca in it, and says so plainly. But as Mrs. Fiske plays the scene
in a tea-gown of elaborate elegance, in which she might with
propriety have received the Archbishop of Canterbury, Kroll's
studied apologies for intruding upon her before she has had time to
dress, and the whole suggestion of undue intimacy between Rebecca
and Rosmer, which Ibsen meant to convey, is irrevocably lost. And
to weaken a situation for the sake of being prettily dressed would
be impossible to a French actress, trained in the delicacies of her
art.

If the feeling for clothes, the sense of their correspondence with
time and place, with public enthusiasms and with private
sensibilities, has always belonged to France, it was a no less
dominant note in Italy during the two hundred years in which she
eclipsed and bewildered the rest of Christendom; and it bore fruit
in those great historic wardrobes which the Italian chroniclers
describe with loving minuteness. We know all about Isabella d' Este's
gowns, as if she had worn them yesterday. We know all about the jewels
which were the assertion of her husband's pride in times of peace,
and his security with the Lombard bankers in times of war. We know
what costumes the young Beatrice d' Este carried with her on her
mission to Venice, and how favourably they impressed the grave
Venetian Senate. We can count the shifts in Lucretia Borgia's
trousseau, when that much-slandered woman became Duchess of Ferrara,
and we can reckon the cost of the gold fringe which hung from her
linen sleeves. We are told which of her robes was wrought with fish
scales, and which with interlacing leaves, and which with a hem of
pure and flame-like gold. Ambassadors described in state papers her
green velvet cap with its golden ornaments, and the emerald she wore
on her forehead, and the black ribbon which tied her beautiful fair
hair.

These vanities harmonized with character and circumstance. The joy
of living was then expressing itself in an overwhelming sense of
beauty, and in material splendour which, unlike the material
splendour of to-day, never overstepped the standard set by the
intellect. Taste had become a triumphant principle, and as women grew
in dignity and importance, they set a higher and higher value on the
compelling power of dress. They had no more doubt on this score than
had wise Homer when he hung the