CHAPTER THREE T 1841-45 HE dress of the first years of the Forties would seem strange to those of both sexes of the twentieth century. Looking back at the pictures which memory brings up, the whole scene has an air of unpracticality, that seems almost inconceivably absurd now. Ladies submitted themselves, and caused their little girls to submit, to have their hair rolled up into small tight balls, about the size of walnuts, and to do their best to sleep comfortably resting on these hard knots, in order that their heads might be covered with curls in the daytime. The older ladies wore earrings resembling inverted marks of exclamation, hanging down as much as three inches. Old ladies often had their hair made up into two broad flat plaits with which they covered up their ears, as if they were ashamed of them, and above which they wore great turbans. Their dresses I do not remember so well, except the shoulder-ofmutton sleeves, which stuck out on both sides, and of which, though in the simplicity of childhood I accepted them as what must be right, as my elders wore them, I can now observe the hideousness from the pictures of that time. Girls were treated with what seemed little short of cruelty. Some idea of prudery ordained that their graceful little limbs should be encased in straight upand-down white trousers, with frills at the ankles, while their little waists were drawn in, and their hair drawn up into hideous little knots, tied with ribbon. Everything was done to detract from the natural grace of the little girl-one of the very sweetest things in nature. The male sex fared no better. I saw in my extreme childhood a few old gentlemen still dressed in top-boots and breeches, and wearing at all times coloured tailed coats with plain gilt buttons, and the last of the judges to wear daily, wig, black breeches, and stockings, even in the streets when he walked to and from Court, was Lord Glenlee, who still sat on the Bench when I was born. He used, before the building of George the IV Bridge, to plunge from Brown Square down into the Cowgate, and climb up one of the filthy closes to the Parliament Square, bewigged and in silk stockings, with his court hat in his hand. In his declining years he was carried daily in a sedan-chair, probably the last of the male sex to use that oldtime vehicle. By the year 1840 the trouser fashion had become practically universal. As a rule the gentleman's nether limbs were encased in the tightest of pants, strapped down over boots during the day, and over shoes at night. The tailed coat was much worn in the daytime. It would have been an outrage for an advocate or a medical man to wear anything else, and in their case a white tie was de rigueur. The coat was made with the tightest of sleeves. I remember while this GENTLEMEN'S FASHIONS fashion still obtained of being taken to hear a great statesman on his receiving the freedom of our city, and when I saw him waving his arms, as he said to the assemblage in pompous tones, "Long may you cherish these glawrious memories of Old (not auld) Lang Syne," I wondered in my youthful eagerness of inquiry how that old man managed to force those great gouty knuckles through the pinched-in sleeves, which made his arm and hand resemble the upper part of the drumstick of a fowl, with the flesh taken off. A gentleman going out in the evening always buttoned his coat across his chest, and with a great white stock put twice round his neck, and held in fold by a big pin and small pin attached together by a chain, or with a shirt front heavily befrilled with crimped edges, he made an excellent suggestion of a pouter pigeon. Above was long hair down to the collar of his coat, and often muttonchop whiskers, but never a moustache or a beard. The tailors put an end to the buttoning of evening coats. When I was quite a little fellow my father took me out with him one day, and we went to his tailors in George Street-Messrs. Rausch & Corpe. The make of evening coats was then changing, and the buttoning across in the evening was going out. On the previous night my father had buttoned his coat across and found it very tight, and the flap on one side sticking out most unsymmetrically. He had sent up |