Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/291

XX over which, of course, Mr. Percy Anderson should preside, visits to the theatre may offer to the student considerable instruction. In other days the scholar resented any incongruities of stage-costume. The satire of Pope pictures them vividly in the early eighteenth century:

Imagine an ancient Roman in a periwig and flowered gown after the Queen Anne fashion! No wonder Addison, as he sat in a side box with two or three friends to watch his tragedy on the first night, needed flasks of Burgundy and champagne to support his spirits, for had he not pleaded in a number of the Spectator for the poet against the costumier? "The ordinary method of making a hero is to clap a huge plume of feathers on his head, which rises so very high that there is often a greater length from his chin to the top of his head than to the sole of his foot. ... As these superfluous ornaments make a great man, a princess gradually receives her grandeur from those additional encumbrances which fall into her tail. I mean the broad sweeping train which follows her in all her motions, and forms constant employment for a boy who stands behind her to open and spread to advantage. I do not know how others are affected at this sight, but I must confess my eyes are wholly taken up with the page's part, and, as for the Queen, I am not so attentive to anything she speaks as to