to go about in this costume, both before and after the Restoration.  He had been a distinguished musician, and, though eccentric, was apparently not insane.)

In a chapter, “De la Nudite,” and in the appendices of his book, De l’Amour (vol. i, p. 221), Senancour gives instances of the occasional practice of nudity in Europe, and adds some interesting remarks of his own; so, also, Dulaure (Des Divinites Generatrices, Ch.  XV).  It would appear, as a rule, that though complete nudity was allowed in other respects, it was usual to cover the sexual parts.

The movement of revolt against nakedness never became completely victorious until the nineteenth century.  That century represented the triumph of all the forces that banned public nakedness everywhere and altogether.  If, as Pudor insists, nakedness is aristocratic and the slavery of clothes a plebeian characteristic imposed on the lower classes by an upper class who reserved to themselves the privilege of physical culture, we may perhaps connect this with the outburst of democratic plebeianism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, reached its climax in the nineteenth century.  It is in any case certainly interesting to observe that by this time the movement had entirely changed its character.  It had become general, but at the same time its foundation had been undermined.  It had largely lost its religious and moral character, and instead was regarded as a matter of convention.  The nineteenth century man who encountered the spectacle of white limbs flashing in the sunlight no longer felt like the mediaeval ascetic that he was risking the salvation of his immortal soul or even courting the depravation of his morals; he merely felt that it was “indecent” or, in extreme cases, “disgusting.”  That is to say he regarded the matter as simply a question of conventional etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of aesthetics.  In thus bringing down his repugnance to nakedness to so low a plane he had indeed rendered it generally acceptable, but at the same time he had deprived it of high sanction.  His profound horror of nakedness was out of relation to the frivolous grounds on which he based it.

We must not, however, under-rate the tenacity with which this horror of nakedness was held.  Nothing illustrates more vividly the deeply ingrained hatred which the nineteenth century felt of nakedness than the ferocity—­there is no other word for it—­with which Christian missionaries to savages all over the world, even in the tropics, insisted on their converts adopting the conventional clothing of Northern Europe.  Travellers’ narratives abound in references to the emphasis placed by missionaries on this change of custom, which was both injurious to the health of the people and degrading to their dignity.  It is sufficient to quote one authoritative witness, Lord Stanmore, formerly Governor of Fiji, who read a long paper to the Anglican Missionary Conference