Some ladies, I notice, wore the long-tongued belt--buckled it in front, and then pushed it round until the buckle came into the centre of the back and the tongue hung down like a tail; but these ladies were not wearing the high-waisted gown, but a gown with a normal waist, and with no train, but a skirt of even fulness and of the same length all the way round. [Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}] There were striped stuffs, piled velvet, rich-patterned silks, and homespun cloths and wool to choose from. Long-peaked shoes, of course, and wooden clogs out of doors. [Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}] The town and country maids, the merchants' wives, and the poor generally, each and all according to purse and pride, dressed in humbler imitation of the cut of the clothes of the high-born, in quite simple dresses, with purse, girdle, and apron, with heads in hoods, or twisted wimples of coarse linen. Well, there you lie, ladies, on the tops of cold tombs, stiff and sedate, your hands uplifted in prayer, your noses as often as not knocked off by later-day schoolboys, crop-headed Puritans, or Henry VIII.'s sacrilegious hirelings. Lie still in your huge head-dresses and your neat-folded gowns--a moral, in marble or bronze, of the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. EDWARD THE FOURTH Reigned twenty-two years: 1461-1483. Born 1441. Married, 1464, Elizabeth Woodville. THE MEN [Illustration: {A man of the time of Edward IV.}] I invite you to call up this reign by a picture of Caxton's shop: you may imagine yourself in the almonry at Westminster, where, in a small enclosure by the west front of the church, there is a chapel and some almshouses. You will be able to see the rich come to look at Mr. Caxton's wares and the poor slinking in to receive alms. 'If it please any man, spiritual or temporal, to buy any pyes of two or three commemorations of Salisbury use emprynted after the form of this present letter, which be well and truly correct, let him come to Westminster into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have them good cheap.' This was Caxton's advertisement. As you watch the people going and coming about the small enclosure, you will notice that the tonsured hair has gone out of fashion, and that whereas the merchants, citizens, and such people wear the roundlet hat, the nobles and fine gentlemen are in black velvet caps, or tall hats with long-peaked brims, or in round high hats with fur brim close to the crown of the hat, or in caps with little rolled brims with a button at the top, over which two laces pass from back to front, and from under the brim there falls the last sign, the dying gasp of the liripipe, now jagged and now with tasselled ends.