to the familiar portraits of the king by Holbein.  Yet the same audience would be wholly undisturbed by anachronisms touching the introduction of silken stockings, or velvet robes, the pattern of plate armour, or the fashion of weapons.  After all, what is chiefly needed to preserve theatrical illusion is a certain harmony of arrangement, which shall be so undemonstratively complete as to escape consideration; no false notes must be struck to divert attention from the designs of the dramatist and from his interpreters, the players; and to these the help derived from scenery and dresses should always be subordinated.  Yet, when has the theatre been thus ordered, or have audiences been so disciplined?  Beaumont, probably, had good reason for writing to Fletcher, concerning a performance of his “Faithful Shepherdess”—­

    Nor want they those who as the boy doth dance
    Between the acts, will censure the whole play;
    Some like if the wax lights be new that day;
    But multitudes there are whose judgment goes
    Headlong according to the actors’ clothes.

The playgoers of Garrick’s time, and long afterwards, were habituated to the defective system of theatrical costume—­had grown up with it.  To them it was part of the stage as they had always known it, and they saw no reason for fault-finding.  And it is conceivable that many plays were little affected by the circumstance that the actors wore court suits.  It was but a shifting of the period of the story represented, a change of venue; and Romeo, in hair-powder, interested just as much as though he had assumed an auburn wig.  The characters were, doubtless, very well played, and the actors appeared, at any rate, as “persons of quality.”  In historical plays one would think the objection to anachronism much more obvious; for there distinct events and personages and settled dates were dealt with.  But there was an understanding that stage costume was purely a conventional matter—­and so came to be tolerated most heterogeneous dressing:  the mixing together of the clothes of almost all centuries and all countries, in a haphazard way, just as they might be discovered heaped up in a theatrical wardrobe.  It was not a case of simple anachronism; it was compound and conflicting.  Still, little objection was offered.

And even a critic above quoted, writing in 1759, and proposing greater accuracy in the costumes of historical plays, refrains from suggesting that comedy should be as strictly treated.  He even advances the opinion that the system of dress in vogue at the date of the play’s production should be disregarded according to “the fluctuations of fashion.”  “What should we think,” he demanded, “of a Lord Foppington now dressed with a large full-bottomed wig, laced cravat, buttons as large as apples, or a Millament with a headdress four storeys high?” And there is something to be said for this view.  The writer of comedy pictures manners, and these do