Within the last century, men have gradually, and it would seem permanently, abandoned the effort to reveal their personality in dress.  They have allowed themselves to be committed for life to a costume of ruthless utilitarianism, which takes no count of physical beauty, or of its just display.  Comfort, convenience, and sanitation have conspired to establish a rigidity of rule never seen before, to which men yield a docile and lamblike obedience.  Robert Burton’s axiom, “Nothing sooner dejects a man than clothes out of fashion,” is as true now as it was three hundred years ago.  Fashion sways the shape of a collar, and the infinitesimal gradations of a hat-brim; but the sense of fitness, and the power of interpreting life, which ennobled fashion in Burton’s day, have disappeared in an enforced monotony.

Men take a strange perverted pride in this mournful sameness of attire,—­delight in wearing a hat like every other man’s hat, are content that it should be a perfected miracle of ugliness, that it should be hot, that it should be heavy, that it should be disfiguring, if only they can make sure of seeing fifty, or a hundred and fifty, other hats exactly like it on their way downtown.  So absolute is this uniformity that the late Marquess of Ailesbury bore all his life a reputation for eccentricity, which seems to have had no other foundation than the fact of his wearing hats, or rather a hat, of distinctive shape, chosen with reference to his own head rather than to the heads of some odd millions of fellow citizens.  The story is told of his standing bare-headed in a hatter’s shop, awaiting the return of a salesman who had carried off his own beloved head-gear, when a shortsighted bishop entered, and, not recognizing the peer, took him for an assistant, and handed him his hat, asking him if he had any exactly like it.  Lord Ailesbury turned the bishop’s hat over and over, examined it carefully inside and out, and gave it back again.  “No,” he said, “I haven’t, and I’ll be damned if I’d wear it, if I had.”

Even before the establishment of the invincible despotism which clothes the gentlemen of Christendom in a livery, we find the masculine mind disposed to severity in the ruling of fashions.  Steele, for example, tells us the shocking story of an English gentleman who would persist in wearing a broad belt with a hanger, instead of the light sword then carried by men of rank, although in other respects he was a “perfectly well-bred person.”  Steele naturally regarded this acquaintance with deep suspicion, which was justified when, twenty-two years afterwards, the innovator married his cook-maid.  “Others were amazed at this,” writes the essayist, “but I must confess that I was not.  I had always known that his deviation from the costume of a gentleman indicated an ill-balanced mind.”