We shall find in the early pages of this book frequent references to Stubbes’s descriptions of articles of dress, but his own life has some bearing on his utterances; so let me bear testimony as to his character and to the absolute truth of his descriptions. He was held up in his own day to contempt by that miserable Thomas Nashe who plagiarized his title and helped his own dull book into popularity by calling it _The Anatomie of Absurdities_; and who further ran on against him in a still duller book, _An Almand for a Parrat_. He called Stubbes “A MarPrelate Zealot and Hypocrite” and Stubbes has been held up by others as a morose man having no family ties and no social instincts. He was in reality the tenderest of husbands to a modest, gentle, pious girl whom he married when she was but fourteen, and with whom he lived in ideal happiness until her death in child-birth when eighteen years old. He bore testimony to his happiness and her goodness in a loving but sad and trying book “intituled” _A Christiall Glasse for Christian Women_. It is a record of a life which was indeed pure as crystal; a life so retiring, so quiet, so composed, so unvarying, a life so remote from any gentlewoman’s life to day that it seems of another ether, another planet, as well as of another century. But it is useful for us to know it, notwithstanding its background of gloomy religionism and its air of unreality; for it helps us to understand the character of Puritan women and of Philip Stubbes. This fair young wife died in an ecstasy, her voice triumphant, her face radiant with visions of another and a glorious life. And yet she was not wholly happy in death; for she had a Puritan conscience, and she thought she _must_ have offended God in some way. She had to search far indeed for the offence; and this was it—it would be absurd if it were not so true and so deep in its sentiment of regret. She and her husband had set their hearts too much in affection upon a little dog that they had loved well, and she found now that “it was a vanitye”; and she repented of it, and bade them bear the dog from her bedside. Knowing Stubbes’s love for this little dog (and knowing it must have been a spaniel, for they were then being well known and beloved and were called “Spaniel-gentles or comforters”—a wonderfully appropriate name), I do not much mind the fierce words with which he stigmatizes the vanity and extravagance of women. I have a strong belief too that if we knew the dress of his child-wife, we would find that he liked her bravely even richly attired, and that he acquired his wonderful mastery of every term and detail of women’s dress, every term of description, through a very uxorious regard of his wife’s apparel. Sir Richard Saltonstall. Sir Richard Saltonstall.