Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/336

316 use till this time. They were small, and often made of feathers and lace. "I send you a smallish muff that you may put in your pocket, and it costs but 14s.," writes Horace Walpole to a friend. Muffs grew larger as time went on, and we find a London citizen going to church with a large white muff—the last new thing from Paris—suspended from his neck. A little pet dog belonging to a lady in the same pew crept in, curled up, and went to sleep, while the owner was occupied with his prayers. The sequel of the story may be easily imagined!

But though there was nothing effeminate in wearing a muff, it was beneath contempt for a man to carry an umbrella. The story of Jonas Hanway—the first man who dared to hold up an umbrella in London, and to brave the jeers and hoots of a London crowd—reads like a fairy-tale to-day, but the innovation made way very slowly, and thirty years after this, there was only one umbrella in Cambridge, and it was kept at a shop and let out by the hour!

With more rapidity the distinction between the dress of the quality and of the commercial classes was being obliterated. Sumptuary laws were already matters of past history. "If great men