d knots of
pearls. This was, however, but for ordinary dances. "He had twenty-seven
suits of clothes made, the richest that embroidery, lace, silk, velvet,
silver, gold, and gems could contribute; one of which was a white uncut
velvet, set all over, both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at
fourscore thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck all over with
diamonds, as were also his sword, girdle, hat, and spurs."[262] In the
masques and banquets with which Buckingham entertained the court, he
usually expended, for the evening, from one to five thousand pounds. To
others I leave to calculate the value of money: the sums of this
gorgeous wastefulness, it must be recollected, occurred before this
million age of ours.

If, to provide the means for such enormous expenditure, Buckingham
multiplied the grievances of monopolies; if he pillaged the treasury for
his eighty thousand pounds' coat; if Rawleigh was at length driven to
his last desperate enterprise to relieve himself of his creditors for a
pair of six thousand pounds' shoes--in both these cases, as in that of
the chivalric Sandricourt, the political economist may perhaps
acknowledge that _there is a sort of luxury highly criminal_. All the
arguments he may urge, all the statistical accounts he may calculate,
and the healthful state of his circulating medium among "the merchants,
embroiderers, silkmen, and jewellers"--will not alter such a moral evil,
which leaves an eternal taint on "the wealth of nations!" It is the
principle that "private vices are public benefits," and that men may be
allowed to ruin their generations without committing any injury to
society.

FOOTNOTES:

[260] The famous Puritanic writer, Philip Stubbes, who published his
"Anatomie of Abuses" in 1593, declares that he "has heard of shirtes
that have cost some ten shillings, some twentie, some fortie, some
five pound, some twentie nobles, and (which is horrible to heare)
some tenne pounde a peece." His book is filled with similar
denunciations of abuses; in which he is followed by other satirists.
They appear to have produced little effect in the way of
reformation; for in the days of James I, John Taylor, the Water
poet, similarly laments the wastefulness of those who--

Wear a farm in shoe-strings edged with gold,
And spangled garters worth a copyhold;
A hose and doublet which a lordship cost;
A gaudy cloak, three manors' p