“Couvrez ce sein que je ne sçaurais voir: A de tels objets les yeux sont blessés, Et cela fait venir de coupables pensées.” Though it be necessary to consider climate and temperature in the matter of dress, we have had weather, even in England, from the severity of which no dress could protect the wearer. Thus, in the year 851, the winter became so suddenly cold and inclement, and went on with such increasing severity, that clothing afforded no warmth to the frame, and the people were widely smitten by paralysis. They suffered excruciating anguish in the limbs; generally the arms and hands were first seized upon by the disease, and those limbs usually became altogether withered and useless. The paralysis respected neither rank, age, nor sex; the highest dignitaries of the Church did not escape, though, of course, they miraculously recovered. The clothiers of the period appear to have been as much puzzled to discover a material for useful wear that would meet the contingency, as a modern tailor would find it difficult to take measure of the pulpy, shapeless, boneless being which Professor Whewell, in his ‘Plurality of Worlds,’ thinks may be existing in Jupiter. And he has a right to think so; for, on our own earth, have we not had animals whose bones were on the outside, and whose inward parts were all of cartilage? They would have been pretty playthings for Jupiter’s emphatically soft nymphs and unvertebrated swains! If the nuns of the Anglo-Saxon times were given to gorgeousness, the clergy were not at all uninclined to dandyism. Boniface himself denounced those priests who wore broad studs and images of worms, as servants of Antichrist. Garments so adorned are looked upon by the descendants of this great Anglo-Saxon missionary as the undoubtedly original “M. B. coats.” The Danes introduced fashions that sadly perplexed the simple tailors of all Anglia. The former, in the days of their paganism, were attired in garments as black as the raven which soared on their national standard. When they came to England they learned to surpass the Anglo-Saxons themselves in the gaiety of their apparel and manners. They even took to combing their hair once a day; became so effeminate as to wash weekly; and changed their body-linen, if not as often as they might, still more frequently than was their wont of old. “By these means,” says old Wallingford, “they pleased the eyes of the women, and frequently seduced the wives and daughters of the nobility.” Alas, that virtue should not be proof against even a half-washed seducer!