Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/117

 Rh some of them wide and some of them narrow, some of silk and some of cloth of gold, some fur-lined, others sewn with gems, and whole coffers full of necklaces and bracelets and ornaments of every kind. The noble Muscovite lady, in her white or blue or yellow leather buskins, also pearl-embroidered, could scarcely stand under her heaped-up glories. She was like a shrine.

This was the wardrobe of the aristocrats. That of the common folk was simpler, as may be well imagined. A shirt and a pair of long boots—two chemises, one over the other, for decency's sake, in the woman’s case—in summer-time; in the winter a coarse blue or black cloth gown, reaching nearly to the feet, and a sheepskin pelisse, were its invariable and chief constituents. For the woman, a metal cross and earrings of some kind were also indispensable. Under the ascetic influence, religion and modesty played a foremost part in the constitution of the female toilet. Even the excessive use of cosmetics seems to have had its origin in this quarter, these being employed to hide charms which had better be concealed. But if God was served by this device, the devil lost nothing by it, and some modes of dressing the hair, and the choice of certain stones, like the emerald and the ruby, considered to heighten the brilliance and expression of the wearer's face, were certainly not dictated solely by the precepts of the Domostroï.

Did the dresses and customs bearing these Tartar names really come out of Tartary? It is a curious thing that Fletcher should never have suspected this origin. According to him, the Russians of his day were dressed à la Grecque. The garb of the Muscovite Sovereigns, identical with that worn by all European monarchs at a much more ancient epoch, certainly came from Byzantium rather than from Samarkand. And the Byzantine origin of the cosmetics so dear to the coquettes of the country is not less certain. They were a legacy from Olga, the wife of Igor. This Princess was attended, when she travelled to Constantinople in 955, by a numerous female suite, and the ladies did not waste the time they spent on the shores of the Bosphorus. In the Europe of the Middle Ages, Constantinople held the place now occupied by Paris, as the metropolis of luxury. The Russian women of the sixteenth century, when they covered their teeth with a black varnish, and even succeeded, by some now unknown process, in dyeing the whites of their eyes black, would seem to have drawn their inspiration from some primitive system of tattooing rather than from the delicate processes of the Greco-Roman belles. But we must take this to be a consequence of that clumsy deformation undergone by every form of art in a country where feminine vanity strove to realize the ideal of beauty set forth in the