678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to: "Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century, we might smile; as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to rise again, and see our haberdashery, would cross themselves, and invoke the Virgin.
But happily no bygone German, or man, rises again; thus the Present is not needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only grows out of it, like a Tree, whose roots are not intertangled with its branches, but lie peaceably underground.

Nay it is very mournful, yet not useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite filled up here, and no room for him; the very Napoleon, the very Byron, in some seven years, has become obsolete, and were now a foreigner to his Europe.

Thus is the Law of Progress secured; and in Clothes, as in all other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue.
"Of the military classes in those old times, whose buff-belts, complicated chains and gorgets, huge churn-boots, and other riding and fighting gear have been bepainted in modern Romance, till the whole has acquired somewhat of a sign-post character,--I shall here say nothing: the civil and pacific classes, less touched upon, are wonderful enough for us.
"Rich men, I find, have _Teusinke_ [a perhaps untranslatable article]; also a silver girdle, whereat hang little bells; so that when a man walks, it is with continual jingling.

Some few, of musical turn, have a whole chime of bells (_Glockenspiel_) fastened there; which, especially in sudden whirls, and the other accidents of walking, has a grateful effect.

Observe too how fond they are of peaks, and Gothic-arch intersections.