ion: {Four women}]

[Illustration: {Four women}]

[Illustration: {Four women}]

[Illustration: {Four women}]

[Illustration: {Four women}]

[Illustration: {Four women}]

[Illustration: The King.]

[Illustration: The Navy.]

[Illustration: The Army.]

[Illustration: Pensioners.]

[Illustration: The Church.]

[Illustration: The Law.]

[Illustration: The Stage.]

[Illustration: The Universities.]

[Illustration: The Country.]

[Illustration: The Duke of Norfolk.]

[Illustration: The City.]

[Illustration: The Duke of Queensberry.]

GEORGE THE FOURTH

Reigned ten years: 1820-1830.

Born 1762. Married, 1795, Caroline of Brunswick.

Out of the many fashion books of this time I have chosen, from a
little brown book in front of me, a description of the fashions for
ladies during one part of 1827. It will serve to show how mere man,
blundering on the many complexities of the feminine passion for
dress--I was going to say clothes--may find himself left amid a froth
of frills, high and dry, except for a whiff of spray, standing in his
unromantic garments on the shore of the great world of gauze and
gussets, while the most noodle-headed girl sails gracefully away upon
the high seas to pirate some new device of the Devil or Paris.

Our wives--bless them!--occasionally treat us to a few bewildering
terms, hoping by their gossamer knowledge to present to our gaze a
mental picture of a new, adorable, ardently desired--hat. Perhaps
those nine proverbial tailors who go to make the one proverbial man,
least of his sex, might, by a strenuous effort, confine the history of
clothes during this reign into a compact literature of forty volumes.
It would be indecent, as undecorous as the advertisements in ladies'
papers, to attempt to fathom the language of the man who endeavoured
to read the monumental effigy to the vanity of human desire for
adornment. But is it adornment?

Nowadays to be dressed well is not always the same thing as to be well
dressed. Often it is far from it. The question of modern clothes is
one of great perplexity. It seems that what is beauty one year may be
the abomination of desolation the next, because the trick of that
beauty has become common property. You puff your hair at the sides,
you are in the true sanctum of the mode; you puff your hair at the
sides, you are for ever utterly cast out as one having no
understanding. I shall not a