When his fellow courtiers wished to gibe at him, they stuck black patches on their noses and with long white staves strutted around the court in imitation of his pompous manner. He is a handsome fellow, but too fat—which was not a curse of his day as of the present. Figures from Funeral Procession of the Duke of Albemarle, 1670. Figures from Funeral Procession of the Duke of Albemarle, 1670. Of course the king changed his dress many times after this solemn assumption of a lifelong garment. It was a restless, uncertain, trying time in men’s dress. They had lost the doublet, and had not found the skirted coat, and stood like the Englishman of Andrew Borde—ready to take a covering from any nation of the earth. I wonder the coat ever survived—that it did is proof of an inherent worth. Knowing the nature of mankind and the modes, the surprise really is that the descendants of Charles and all English folk are not now wearing shawls or peplums or anything save a coat and waistcoat. Some of the sturdy rich members of the governors’ cabinets and the assemblies and some of our American officers who had been in his Majesty’s army, or had served a term in the provincial militia, and had had a hot skirmish or two with marauding Indians on the Connecticut River frontier, and some very worthy American gentlemen who were not widely renowned either in military or diplomatic circles and had never worn armor save in the artist’s studio,—these were all painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller and by Sir Peter Lely, and by lesser lights in art, dressed in a steel corselet of the artist, and wearing their own good Flanders necktie and their own full well-buckled wig. There were some brave soldiers, too, who were thus painted, but there were far more in armor than had ever smelt smoke of powder. It was a good comfortable fashion for the busy artist. It must have been much easier when you had painted a certain corselet a hundred times to paint it again than to have to paint all kinds of new colors and stuffs. And the portrait in armor was almost always kitcat, and that disposed of the legs, ever a nuisance in portrait-painting. While the virago-sleeves were growing more and more ornamental, and engageants were being more and more worn by women, men’s sleeves assumed a most interesting form. The long coat, or cassock, had sleeves which were cut off at the elbow with great cuffs and were worn over enormous ruffled undersleeves; and they were even cut midway between shoulder and elbow, were slashed and pointed and beribboned to a wonderful degree. This lasted but a few years, the years when the cassock was shaping itself definitely into a skirted coat. Perhaps the height of ornamentation in sleeves was in the closing years of the reign of Charles II, though fancy sleeves lingered till the time of George I. Earl of Southampton. Earl of Southampton.