In reply to these and similar strictures there is nothing much to be said, unless it be that actors and audience alike were content with things as they were, and that now and then reforms had been attempted, without however resulting in any particular success.  Garrick had rendered the theatre invaluable services both as actor and as stage-manager, but he had been unable to effect any very beneficial change in the matter of dress.  Indeed, it seems probable that his attempt to appear as Othello had failed chiefly because he had followed Foote’s example and attired the character after a Moorish fashion, discarding the modern military uniforms in which Quin and Barry had been wont to play the part.  The actor’s short stature, black face, and Oriental dress had reminded the audience of the turbaned negro pages in attendance upon ladies of quality at that period:  “Pompey with the teakettle,” as Quin had said, having possibly a plate of Hogarth’s present in his mind; and the innovation, which was certainly commendable enough, was unfavourably received, even to incurring some contempt.  Garrick’s dress as Hotspur, “a laced frock and a Ramilies wig,” was objected to, not for the good reason that it was inappropriate, but on the strange ground that it was “too insignificant for the character.”  A critic writing in 1759, while timidly advocating the amendment of stage dress, proceeds to doubt whether the reform would be “well received by audiences who have been so long habituated to such glaring impropriety and negligence in the other direction.”  Clearly alteration was a matter of some difficulty, and not to be lightly undertaken.

It is well known that Garrick, in the part of Macbeth, wore a court suit of scarlet and gold lace, with, in the latter scenes of the tragedy, “a wig,” as Lee Lewes the actor says in his Memoirs, “as large as any now worn by the gravest of our Barons of the Exchequer”—­a similar costume being adopted by other Macbeths of that time—­Smith and Barry for instance.  When the veteran actor Macklin first played Macbeth in 1774, however, he assumed a “Caledonian habit,” and although it is said the audience, when they saw “a clumsy old man, who looked more like a Scotch piper than a general and a prince of the blood, stumping down the stage at the head of an army, were generally inclined to laugh,” still the attempt at reform won considerable approbation.  At that time it was held to be unquestionable that the correct costume of Macbeth should be that of the Highlander of the snuff-shop; but in later days it was discovered that even the tartan was an anachronism in such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours.  Even the bonnet with the eagle’s feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his “shuttlecock” headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible:  the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour.  But