It is worth while to state that costumes, like opinions, reproduce themselves. As the ideas which were once in vogue, and have been abandoned, return and resume their influence and orthodoxy, so do the costumes of other days continually reappear, it is true, with a difference often striking enough, for men no longer wear either coats of mail or inexpressibles of velvet, yet the Norman cloak of the Black Prince, and the _sack_ of Lauzun, the handsome French colonel, who, during our own Revolutionary war, turned the heads and carried away the hearts of half the women of Philadelphia, are still every day to be seen. The same thing is observable in female costume. The long waists, tight sleeves and full skirts of old times have returned, and even the ungainly ruffs of Queen Elizabeth’s age have shown a disposition to return. The mode of dressing the hair is also retracing itself, so that there is little real difference between the traditional court-dress of former times and that of every-day life worn at present, except the train. The following is a caricature of that day, but scarcely more outré than the bearded creatures from time to time seen in our own streets. It may be remarked that the passion for hair on the face always is consequent on a war. In the time of Henri IV, all the world was bearded; so during the days of Cromwell were his ironsides, and now men who never saw a shot fired, force the sublime into the ridiculous, by parading a moustache in every thoroughfare throughout the country. [Illustration] Who knows but that our own Mexican war may exert an influence on dress, and that some day the Ranchero’s striped blanket and broad-brimmed hat may become the fashion. Men will stalk about the streets in boots of cow-hide, and instead of hunting with dogs and rifles, the _lazo_ or _lariette_ will be adopted universally. All the world knows that immediately after the return of the army of the Duke of Wellington to England, from Waterloo, the military black stock was adopted, and it may be that the green pantaloons with the brown stripe, now worn, are an imitation of the dress of the Mexican veterans who were defeated at Cherebusco. The same may be said of the cloth caps, with the covers of oil-skin, now so much in vogue. It may be remarked that this article of dress has always followed the _tenue_ of the army, the flat cap replacing the hussar’s, as the latter did the old gig-top leather apparatus. Other nations of Europe did not participate in the French Revolution, but became imitators of the costumes it created. We have now come to the period of the Directory, which exerted its influence on costume, or rather the influence of which was reflected by the costume of the day.