[Footnote B: That cultivated gentleman, John Evelyn, two centuries ago wrote some amusing words on this subject. After quoting the witty saying of Malvezzi,--"I vestimenti negli animali sono molto securi segni della loro natura, negli nomini del lor cervello,"--he goes on to say, "Be it excusable in the French to alter and impose the mode on others, 'tis no less a weakness and a shame in the rest of the world, who have no dependence on them, to admit them, at least to that degree of levity as to turn into all their shapes without discrimination; so as when the freak takes our Monsieurs to appear like so many farces or Jack Puddings on the stage, all the world should alter shape and play the pantomimes with them. Methinks a French tailor, with an ell in his hand, looks like the enchantress Circe over the companions of Ulysses, and changes them into as many forms.... Something I would indulge to youth; something to age and humor. But what have we to do with these foreign butterflies? In God's name, let the change be our own, not borrowed of others; for why should I dance after a Monsieur's flageolet, that have a set of English viols for my concert? We need no French inventions for the stage or for the back."--From a pamphlet entitled _Tyrannus, or the Mode_. "Si le costume bourgeois," says George Sand, in _Le Péché de M. Antoine_, "de notre époque est le plus triste, le plus incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais inventé, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvénients et toutes ses laideurs révoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austère et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poésie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le _monsieur_ aux habits noirs, au menton rasé, aux mains gantées, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la société n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, une tâche importune dans le tableau. Votre costume gênant et disparate inspire alors la pitié plus que les haillons du pauvre, on sent que vous êtes déplacé au grand air, et que votre livrée vous écrase."]