"Yet," he proceeds, "those despicable clothes had, at different periods of time, bedecked real lords and dukes," and were of considerable value, if only to strip of their decorations and take to pieces.

He laments the general decline in splendour of dress, and declares that thirty years before not a Templar, or decently-dressed young man, but wore a rich gold-laced hat and scarlet waistcoat, with a broad gold lace, also laced frocks for morning dress.
Monmouth Street, St.Giles's, is now known by another name; but for many years its dealers in cast clothes rendered important aid to the actors and managers.

It was to Monmouth Street, as he confesses, that Tate Wilkinson hastened, when permitted to undertake the part of the Fine Gentleman in Garrick's farce of "Lethe," at Covent Garden.

For two guineas he obtained the loan, for one night only, of a heavy embroidered velvet spangled suit of clothes, "fit," he says, "for the king in 'Hamlet.'" Repeating the character, he was constrained to depend upon the wardrobe of the theatre, and appeared in "a very short old suit of clothes, with a black velvet ground and broad gold flowers, as dingy as the twenty-four letters on a piece of gilded gingerbread"-- the dress, indeed, which Garrick had worn when playing Lothario, in "The Fair Penitent," ten years before.

And it was to Monmouth Street that Austin repaired, when cast for a very inferior part--a mere attendant--in the same tragedy, in order to equip himself as like to Garrick as he could--for Garrick was to reappear as Lothario in a new suit of clothes.