The dress of the Tudor period was magnificent beyond description. In a wardrobe account of Henry VIII., seven yards of purple cloth-of-gold damask is apportioned for a kirtle for Catherine of Arragon. As in the case of the men, the sleeves were invariably the richest portion of women's dress. "Amongst the inventories of this reign we find: three pair of purple satin sleeves for women; one pair of linen sleeves, paned with gold over the arm, quilted with black silk, and wrought with flowers between the panes and at the hands; one pair of sleeves of purple gold tissue damask wire, each sleeve tied with aglets of gold; one pair of crimson satin sleeves, four buttons of gold being set on each sleeve, and in every button nine pearls." This extravagance was more than continued during the reign of Elizabeth. It is thus satirised by Beaumont and Fletcher in "Four Plays in One." "I went then to Vanity, whom I found Attended by an endless troop of taylors, Mercers, embroiderers, feather-makers, fumers; All occupations opening like a mart, That serve to rig the body out with bravery; And through the room new fashions flew like flies, In thousand gaudy shapes; Pride waiting on her, And busily surveying all the breaches Time and decaying nature had wrought in her, Which still with art she piec'd again, and strengthened. I told your wants; she shew'd me gowns and headtires, Embroider'd waste coats, smocks seamed through with cut-work, Scarfs, mantles, petticoats, muffs, powders, paintings, Dogs, monkies, parrots; all of which seem'd to show me The way her money went." The beauties of the Court of the Merry Monarch are made familiar to us by the pencil of Sir Peter Lely.[14] The age was distinguished in the case of the women not so much for the magnificence of its costume as for the scantiness of it. It was to a certain extent a return to the simplicity of Nature! "If," says Addison, writing in the _Spectator_, "we survey the pictures of our great-grandmothers in Queen Elizabeth's time, we see them clothed down to the very wrists, and up to the very chin. The hands and face were the only samples they gave of their beautiful persons. The following age of females made larger discoveries of their complexion. They first of all tucked up their garments to the elbow, and, notwithstanding the tenderness of the sex, were content for the information of mankind to expose their arms to the coldness of the air, and injuries of the weather." They affected a mean between dress and nakedness, which occasioned the publication of a book entitled "A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders," with a preface by Richard Baxter, _temp._ Charles II. Herrick's lines may be said to foreshadow the period:--