Since a hatred and revolt against this excess was one of the conditions which positively led to the formation of the Puritan political party if not of the Separatist religious faith, and as a consequence to the settlement of the English colonies in America, let us recount the conditions of dress in England when America was settled. Let us regard first the dress of a courtier whose name is connected closely and warmly in history and romance with the colonization of America; a man who was hated by the Pilgrim and Puritan fathers but whose dress in some degree and likeness, though modified and simplified, must have been worn by the first emigrants to Virginia across seas—let us look at the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a hero and a scholar, but he was also a courtier; and of a court, too, where every court-attendant had to bethink himself much and ever of dress, for dress occupied vastly the thought and almost wholly the public conversation of his queen and her successor. Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh. To understand Raleigh’s dress, you must know the man and his life; to comprehend its absurdities and forgive its follies and see whence it originated, you must know Elizabeth and her dress; you must see her with “oblong face, eyes small, yet black; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, her teeth black; false hair and that red,”—these are the striking and plain words of the German ambassador to her court. You must look at this queen with her colorless meagre person lost in a dress monstrous in size, yet hung, even in its enormous expanse of many square yards, with crowded ornaments, tags, jewels, laces, embroideries, gimp, feathers, knobs, knots, and aglets, with these bedizened rankly, embellished richly. You must see her talking in public of buskins and gowns, love-locks and virginals, anything but matters of seriousness or of state; you must note her at a formal ceremonial tickling handsome Dudley in the neck; watch her dancing, “most high and disposedly” when in great age; you must see her giving Essex a hearty boxing of the ear; hear her swearing at her ministers. You must remember, too, her parents, her heritage. From King Henry VIII came her love of popularity, her great activity, her extraordinary self-confidence, her indomitable will, her outbursts of anger, her cruelty, just as came her harsh, mannish voice. From her mother, Anne Boleyn, came her sensuous love of pleasure, of dress, of flattery, of gayety and laughter. Her nature came from her mother, her temper from her father. The familiarity with Robert Dudley was but a piece with her boisterous romps in her girlhood, and her flap in the face of young Talbot when he saw her “unready in my night-stuff.” But she had more in her than came from Henry and Anne; she had her own individuality, which made her as hard as steel, made her resolute, made her live frugally and work hard, and, above all, made her know her limitations. The