back to form a deep
square cuff which was often made of black or coloured velvet, or of
fur.

[Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VIII.; a head-dress}]

In all this I am taking no account of the German fashions, which I
must describe separately. Look at the drawings I have made of the
German fashion. I find that they leave me dumb--mere man has but a
limited vocabulary when the talk comes to clothes--and these dresses
that look like silk pumpkins, blistered and puffed and slashed, sewn
in ribs, swollen, and altogether so queer, are beyond the furious
dashes that my pen makes at truth and millinery. The costumes of the
people of this age have grown up in the minds of most artists as being
inseparable from the drawings of Holbein and Duerer.

[Illustration: {Two women of the time of Henry VIII.}]

Surely, I say to myself, most people who will read this will know
their Holbein and Duerer, between whom there lies a vast difference,
but who between them show, the one, the estate of England, and the
other, those most German fashions which had so powerful an influence
upon our own. Both these men show the profusion of richness, the
extravagant follies of the dress of their time, how, to use the words
of Pliny: 'We penetrate into the bowels of the earth, digging veins of
gold and silver, and ores of brass and lead; we seek also for gems and
certain little pebbles. Driving galleries into the depths, we draw out
the bowels of the earth, that the gems we seek may be worn on the
finger. How many hands are wasted in order that a single joint may
sparkle! If any hell there were, it had assuredly ere now been
disclosed by the borings of avarice and luxury!'

[Illustration: A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII. (1509-1547)

Notice the wide cuffs covered with gold network, and the rich panel
of the under-skirt.]

[Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VIII.; three types of
sleeve}]

Or in the writings of Tertullian, called by Sigismund Feyerabendt,
citizen and printer of Frankfort, a 'most strict censor who most
severely blames women:' 'Come now,' says Tertullian, 'if from the
first both the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Chinese spun from the
tree, and the Tyrians dyed and the Phrygians embroidered, and the
Babylonians inwove; and if pearls shone and rubies flashed, if gold
itself, too, came up from the earth with the desire for it; and if
now, too, no lying but the mirror's were allowed, Eve,