ius Caesar; has only to lean forward to smile to Pasquino, the
wittiest of tailors.

John Pepys, the tailor, gossips with his neighbour who cut that
jackanapes coat with silver buttons so proudly worn by Samuel Pepys,
his son. Mr. Schweitzer, who cut Beau Brummell's coat, talks to Mr.
Meyer, who shaped his pantaloons. Our world is full of the sound of
scissors, the clipping of which, with the gossiping tongues, drown the
grander voices of history.

As you will see, I have devoted myself entirely to civil costume--that
is, the clothes a man or a woman would wear from choice, and not by
reason of an appointment to some ecclesiastical post, or to a military
calling, or to the Bar, or the Bench. Such clothes are but symbols of
their trades and professions, and have been dealt with by persons who
specialize in those professions.

I have taken the date of the Conquest as my starting-point, and from
that date--a very simple period of clothes--I have followed the
changes of the garments reign by reign, fold by fold, button by
button, until we arrive quite smoothly at Beau Brummell, the inventor
of modern clothes, the prophet of cleanliness.

I have taken considerable pains to trace the influence of one garment
upon its successor, to reduce the wardrobe for each reign down to its
simplest cuts and folds, so that the reader may follow quite easily
the passage of the coat from its birth to its ripe age, and by this
means may not only know the clothes of one time, but the reasons for
those garments. To the best of my knowledge, such a thing has never
been done before; most works on dress try to include the world from
Adam to Charles Dickens, lump a century into a page, and dismiss the
ancient Egyptians in a couple of colour plates.

So many young gentlemen have blown away their patrimony on feathers
and tobacco that it is necessary for us to confine ourselves to
certain gentlemen and ladies in our own country. A knowledge of
history is essential to the study of mankind, and a knowledge of
history is never perfect without a knowledge of the clothes with which
to dress it.

A man, in a sense, belongs to his clothes; they are so much a part of
him that, to take him seriously, one must know how he walked about, in
what habit, with what air.

I am compelled to speak strongly of my own work because I believe in
it, and I feel that the series of paintings in these volumes are
really a valuable addition to English history. To be m