tors and a measured
tread of soft-shoed feet than lute and dance of airy millinery. The
axe of the executioner soiled many white shirts, and dreadful
forebodings fluttered the dovecots of high-hennined ladies.

The old order was dying; Medievalism, which made a last spluttering
flame in the next reign, was now burnt low, and was saving for that
last effort. When Richard married Anne Neville, in the same year was
Raphael born in Italy; literature was beginning, thought was
beginning; many of the great spirits of the Renaissance were alive and
working in Italy; the very trend of clothes showed something vaguely
different, something which shows, however, that the foundations of the
world were being shaken--so shaken that men and women, coming out of
the gloom of the fourteenth century through the half-light of the
fifteenth, saw the first signs of a new day, the first show of spring,
and, with a perversity or an eagerness to meet the coming day, they
began to change their clothes.

It is in this reign of Richard III. that we get, for the men, a hint
of the peculiar magnificence of the first years of the sixteenth
century; we get the first flush of those wonderful patterns which are
used by Memline and Holbein, those variations of the pine-apple
pattern, and of that peculiar convention which is traceable in the
outline of the Tudor rose.

The men, at first sight, do not appear very different to the men of
Edward IV.'s time; they have the long hair, the general clean-shaven
faces, open-breasted tunics, and full-pleated skirts. But, as a rule,
the man, peculiar to his time, the clothes-post of his age, has
discarded the tall peaked hat, and is almost always dressed in the
black velvet, stiff-brimmed hat. The pleated skirt to his tunic has
grown longer, and his purse has grown larger; the sleeves are tighter,
and the old tunic with the split, hanging sleeves has grown fuller,
longer, and has become an overcoat, being now open all the way down.
You will see that the neck of the tunic is cut very low, and that you
may see above it, above the black velvet with which it is so often
bound, the rich colour or fine material of an undergarment, a sort of
waistcoat, and yet again above that the straight top of a
finely-pleated white shirt. Sometimes the sleeves of the tunic will be
wide, and when the arm is flung up in gesticulation, the baggy white
shirt, tight-buttoned at the wrist, will show. Instead of the overcoat
with the han