For detail one can do no better than go to Holbein, the master of detail, and to-day, when photographs of pictures are so cheap, and lives of painters, copiously illustrated, are so easily attainable at low prices, it is the finest education, not only in painting, but in Tudor atmosphere and in matters of dress, to go straightway and study the master--that master who touched, without intention, on the moral of his age when he painted a miniature of the Blessed Thomas More on the back of a playing card. EDWARD THE SIXTH Reigned six years: 1547-1553. Born, 1537. THE MEN AND WOMEN [Illustration: {A man of the time of Edward VI.; a type of hat}] Here we have a reign which, from its very shortness, can hardly be expected to yield us much in the way of change, yet it shows, by very slight movements, that form of growth which preludes the great changes to come. I think I may call a halt here, and proceed to tell you why this volume is commenced with Henry VII., called the Tudor and Stuart volume, and ends with the Cromwells. It is because, between these reigns, the tunic achieves maturity, becomes a doublet, and dies, practically just in the middle of the reign of Charles II. of pungent memory. The peculiar garment, or rather, this garment peculiar to a certain time, runs through its various degrees of cut. It is, at first, a loose body garment with skirts; the skirts become arranged in precise folds, the folds on the skirt are shortened, the shorter they become the tighter becomes the coat; then we run through with this coat in its periods of puffings, slashings, this, that, and the other sleeve, all coats retaining the small piece of skirt or basque, and so to the straight, severe Cromwellian jerkin with the piece of skirt cut into tabs, until the volume ends, and hey presto! there marches into history a Persian business--a frock coat, straight, trim, quite a near cousin to our own garment of afternoon ceremony. For a sign of the times it may be mentioned that a boy threw his cap at the Host just at the time of the Elevation. To Queen Elizabeth has been given the palm for the wearing of the first silk stockings in England, but it is known that Sir Thomas Gresham gave a pair of silk stockings to Edward VI. We now see a more general appearance in the streets of the flat cap upon the heads of citizens. The hood, that eminently practical head-gear, took long to die, and, when at last it went out of fashion, except among the labouring classes, there came in the cap that now remains to us in the cap of the Beefeaters at the Tower of London. [Illustration: {Two men of the time of Edward VI.}] It is the time of jerkin or jacket, doublet or coat, and hose--generally worn with trunks, which were puffed, short knickerbockers.