The only law which now obtains at Harvard College on the subject of dress is this: "On Sabbath, Exhibition, Examination, and Commencement days, and on all other public occasions, each student, in public, shall wear a black coat, with buttons of the same color, and a black hat or cap."--_Orders and Regulations of the Faculty of Harv. Coll._, July, 1853, p. 5. At one period in the history of Yale College, a passion for expensive dress having become manifest among the students, the Faculty endeavored to curb it by a direct appeal to the different classes. The result was the establishment of the Lycurgan Society, whose object was the encouragement of plainness in apparel. The benefits which might have resulted from this organization were contravened by the rashness of some of its members. The shape which this rashness assumed is described in a work entitled "Scenes and Characters in College," written by a Yale graduate of the class of 1821. "Some members were seized with the notion of a _distinctive dress_. It was strongly objected to; but the measure was carried by a stroke of policy. The dress proposed was somewhat like that of the Quakers, but less respectable,--a rustic cousin to it, or rather a caricature; namely, a close coatee, with stand-up collar, and _very_ short skirts,--_skirtees_, they might be called,--the color gray; pantaloons and vest the same;--making the wearer a monotonous gray man throughout, invisible at twilight. The proposers of this metamorphosis, to make it go, selected an individual of small and agreeable figure, and procuring a suit of fine material, and a good fit, placed him on a platform as a specimen. On _him_ it appeared very well, as a belted blouse does on a graceful child; and all the more so, as he was a favorite with the class, and lent to it the additional effect of agreeable association. But it is bad logic to derive a general conclusion from a single fact: it did not follow that the dress would be universally becoming because it was so on him. However, majorities govern; the dress was voted. The tailors were glad to hear of it, expecting a fine run of business. "But when a tall son of Anak appeared in the little bodice of a coat, stuck upon the hips; and still worse, when some very clumsy forms assumed the dress, and one in particular, that I remember, who was equally huge in person and coarse in manners, whose taste, or economy, or both,--the one as probably as the other,--had led him to the choice of an ugly pepper-and-salt, instead of the true Oxford mix, or whatever the standard gray was called, and whose tailor, or tailoress, probably a tailoress, had contrived to aggravate his natural disproportions by the most awkward fit imaginable,--then indeed you might have said that 'some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.' They looked like David's messengers, maltreated and sent back by Hanun.[23]