The men were no less remarkable than the women for the clothes they wore, no less capricious in their changes. A decided, if not a conspicuous, turn of public taste had done much since the accession of the first George to minimize if not to obliterate the differences between class and class. Men no longer consented readily to carry the badge of their calling in their daily costume, and the great world came gradually to be no longer divided sharply from the little world by marked distinction of dress. But still, and for long after 1760, the clothes of men were scarcely less brilliant, scarcely less importunate in their demands upon the attention of their wearers, than the clothes of women. Men made a brave show in those days. A group of men might be as strong in color and as vivid in contrast as a group of women; the neutralization of tone, the degradation of hue, did not begin till much later, and only conquered in the cataclysm of the birth-throes of two republics. Blue and scarlet, green and yellow, crimson and purple, orange and plum-color were the daily wear of the well-to-do; and even for the less wealthy there were the warm browns and murreys, the bottle-greens and clarets, and lavenders and buffs which made any crowd a thing to please a painter in the eighteenth century. In all the {18} varying breeds of beaux and macaronis and dandies, of bucks and fribbles, into which the fine gentlemen of the age allowed themselves to be classified, the one dominant feature, the one common characteristic, was the love for gold and silver and fine laces, for gaudiness of color and richness of ornament, for every kind of exquisite extravagance, every refinement in foppishness. There was a passion for the punctilio of dress, for the grace of a gold-headed cane and a chased sword-hilt, for the right ribbon, the right jewel, the right flower, and the right perfume, for the right powder in the hair and the right seals on the fob and the right heels and buckles on the shoes. There was an ardent appreciation, an uncompromising worship of the fine feathers that make fine birds. [Sidenote: 1761--The wine-drinking propensities of the age]