a capatain hat!" There was
no limit to the caprice and extravagance. Hose and breeches of silk,
velvet, or other rich stuff, and fringed garters wrought of gold or
silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items noted. Burton
says, "'Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks and an hundred
oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back." Even
serving-men and tailors wore jewels in their shoes.

We should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the
arras, tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk hangings of many
colors, the splendid plate on the tables and sideboards. Even in the
houses of the middle classes the furniture was rich and comfortable, and
there was an air of amenity in the chambers and parlors strewn with sweet
herbs and daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers. Lights
were placed on antique candelabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there
were living candleholders. "Give me a torch," says Romeo; "I'll be a
candle-holder, and look on." Knowledge of the details of luxury of an
English home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts
of allusions in Shakespeare.

Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark
of gentility, and hospitality was unbounded. During the lord mayor's term
in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or foreigner
could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat. Dinner, served
at eleven in the early years of James, attained a degree of epicureanism
rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with their
fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611. There was mighty
eating and swigging at the banquets, and carousing was carried to an
extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at the
king's palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of
Denmark, when the company and even their majesties abandoned discretion
and sobriety, and "the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication."

The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem
to have been compounded from the characters of the two sovereigns. Like
Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and sometimes, like
James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated. The credulity and
superstition of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the
sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of
which w