th
no less care for a more than possible neatness, their coats are combed
and curled, their attitudes are studied and graceful, they wear
carefully made collars, ornamented with chased silver and gold.

Centuries have dimmed the wall-painting, sunshine has faded it, mould
has mottled the broad surfaces of red and blue and green, and a later
age has done away with the dresses represented; yet, when the frescos in
the library of the Cathedral at Siena, for instance, were newly
finished, they were the fashion-plates of the year and month, executed
by a great artist, it is true, grouped with matchless skill and drawn
with supreme mastery of art, but as far from representing the ordinary
scenes of daily life as those terrible coloured prints published
nowadays for tailors, in which a number of beautiful young gentlemen, in
perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an
equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and
pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the
aesthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of
the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of
truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective
relations of the great artist's masterpiece and of the poor modern
lithograph to the realities of each period, there is the clue to the
daily life of the Middle Age.

Living was outwardly rough as compared with the representations of it,
though it was far more refined than in any other part of Europe, and
Italy long set the fashion to the world in habits and manners. People
kept their fine clothes for great occasions, there was a keeper of robes
in every large household, and there were rooms set apart for the
purpose. In every-day life, the Barons wore patched hose and leathern
jerkins, stained and rusted by the joints of the armour that was so
often buckled over them, or they went about their dwellings in long
dressing-gowns which hid many shortcomings. When gowns, and hose, and
jerkins were well worn, they were cut down for the boys of the family,
and the fine dresses, only put on for great days, were preserved as
heirlooms from generation to generation, whether they fitted the
successive wearers or not. The beautiful tight-fitting hose which, in
the paintings of the time, seem to fit like theatrical tights, were
neither woven nor knitted, but were made of stout cloth, and must often
have been b