the tallest and stoutest men that can be found in all England, being carefully selected for this service, were bringing dinner, twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half an hour together.  At the end of all this ceremonial, a number of unmarried ladies appeared, who with particular solemnity lifted the meat off the table and conveyed it into the Queen’s inner and more private chamber, where, after she had chosen for herself, the rest goes to the Ladies of the court.”

The queen dined and supped alone, with very few attendants.  II

We now approach perhaps the most important matter in this world, namely, dress.  In nothing were the increasing wealth and extravagance of the period more shown than in apparel.  And in it we are able to study the origin of the present English taste for the juxtaposition of striking and uncomplementary colors.  In Coryat’s “Crudities,” 1611, we have an Englishman’s contrast of the dress of the Venetians and the English.  The Venetians adhered, without change, to their decent fashion, a thousand years old, wearing usually black:  the slender doublet made close to the body, without much quilting; the long hose plain, the jerkin also black—­but all of the most costly stuffs Christendom can furnish, satin and taffetas, garnished with the best lace.  Gravity and good taste characterized their apparel.  “In both these things,” says Coryat, “they differ much from us Englishmen.  For whereas they have but one color, we use many more than are in the rainbow, all the most light, garish, and unseemly colors that are in the world.  Also for fashion we are much inferior to them.  For we wear more fantastical fashions than any nation under the sun doth, the French only excepted.”  On festival days, in processions, the senators wore crimson damask gowns, with flaps of crimson velvet cast over their left shoulders; and the Venetian knights differed from the other gentlemen, for under their black damask gowns, with long sleeves, they wore red apparel, red silk stockings, and red pantofles.

Andrew Boord, in 1547, attempting to describe the fashions of his countrymen, gave up the effort in sheer despair over the variety and fickleness of costume, and drew a naked man with a pair of shears in one hand and a piece of cloth in the other, to the end that he should shape his apparel as he himself liked; and this he called an Englishman.  Even the gentle Harrison, who gives Boord the too harsh character of a lewd popish hypocrite and ungracious priest, admits that he was not void of judgment in this; and he finds it easier to inveigh against the enormity, the fickleness, and the fantasticality of the English attire than to describe it.  So unstable is the fashion, he says, that today the Spanish guise is in favor; tomorrow the French toys are most fine and delectable; then the high German apparel is the go; next the Turkish manner is best liked, the Morisco gowns, the Barbary sleeves, and the short French breeches; in a word, “except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen in England.”