but that all this, as well as habits of “cloth of greene and scarleteen,—cut work and brodwar, was all,” as the Chronicler expresses it, “for unpayed;” that is, was _not paid for_. So that very many among us do not so much despise the wisdom afforded us by the example of our ancestors as didactic poets and commonplace honest writers falsely allege them to do. And those ancestors of Richard the Second’s time were especially given to glorify themselves in parti-coloured garments of white and red, such being the colours of the King’s livery (as blue and white were those of John of Gaunt); and they who wore these garments, sometimes of half-a-dozen colours in each, why they looked, says an old writer, “as though the fire of St. Anthony, or some such mischance,” had cankered and eaten into half their bodies. The long-toed shoes, held up to the knee by a chain and hook, were called _crackowes_, the fashion thereof coming from Cracow in Poland. The not less significant name of “devil’s receptacles” were given to the wide sleeves of this reign, for the reason, as the Monk of Evesham tells us, that whatever was stolen was thrust into them. The fashion of clothes has long ceased to mark the position of the wearer. On this subject, Fuller says in his ‘Church History,’ when treating of the time of Edward III., that “some had a project that men’s clothes might be their signs to show their birth, degree, or estate, so that the quality of an unknown person might, at the first sight, be expounded by his apparel. But this was at once let fall as impossible: statesmen in all ages, notwithstanding their several laws to the contrary, being fain to connive at men’s riot in this kind, which maintaineth more poor people than their charity.” Distinction in dress, it will be remembered, was not allowed by More in his Utopia. “All the island over,” he says, “they make their own clothes, without any other distinction than that which is necessary for marking the difference between the two sexes, and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters; and as it is not ungrateful nor uneasy, so it is fitted for their climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned.” A costume suitable for all conditions of the seasons, were a consummation that will long be among the things to be devoutly wished for, and never attained.