usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed beards.  We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, and perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because he wore his own hair instead of a wig.  In France, half a century later, not only the perruque, but the menton glabre was regarded as symptomatic of the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge of romanticism.  At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us, “there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugene Deveria and the beard of Petrus Borel.  To wear them required a courage, a coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . .  It was the fashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle cadaverous, if possible.  It gave one an air of doom, Byronic, giaourish, devoured by passion and remorse.”  It will be remembered that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected at one time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and that the conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and high collar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainly atheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society—­would-be corsairs or banditti.  It is interesting, therefore, to discover that in France, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being “considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine.”  A certain gilet rouge which Gautier wore when he led the claque at the first performance of “Hernani” has become historic.  This flamboyant garment—­a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to hiss Hugo’s play—­was, in fact, a pourpoint or jerkin of cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks and eyes.  From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced the opera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it would not have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night’s performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.[25] The young enthusiasts of le petit cenacle carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation of the celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skull in their feasts at le Petit Moulin Rouge.  It had belonged to a drum-major, and Gerard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been an army surgeon.  One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demanded that it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of the hero of Victor Hugo’s novel, “Han d’Islande,” who “drank the water of the seas in the skull of the dead.”  Another caput mortuum stood on Hugo’s mantelpiece in place of a clock.[26] “If it did not tell the hour, at least it made us think of the irreparable flight of time.  It was the verse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism.”  There was a decided flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spirit of the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger’s classic, “La Vie de Boheme.” [27]