Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/516

 Rh Hats. — Man's most influential article of wearing apparel is the hat. It is (or ought to be) the orna ment and protection of his chief corporeal member. The privilege of keeping it on in every presence is one of the fundamentals of the Quakers and of cer tain Spanish grandees, and we believe it appertained to French lawyers even in court at one period. An obscure poet tells us : — "So Britain's monarch once uncovered sat, While Bradshaw bullied in a broad-brimmed hat." The members of the House of Commons greatly cherish their customary right of sitting with their hats on in the sessions of that body. Some Jews wear theirs in church. When certain priests die, they are set up in state with a stove-pipe hat on. The hero of that very clever novel, "The Entailed Hat," in sisted on dying with the hat on, and being buried with it. What insult so deadly as to knock off a man's hat? Is it not Bret Harte who tells the story of the " tender-foot " who came to the mines wearing a tall silk hat? Whereupon much coarse jeering ensued, patiently borne, until one rash person haning dared to lay sacrilegious hand upon the hat, there ensued a cyclone which devastated the band of tor mentors. What condescension so great as to take oft" the hat voluntarily? Our own wittiest of poets. Holmes, discoursing on the relative importance of different articles of clothing, says — we quote from memory : — "Coat, boots may fail, the hat is always fell." One has known instances of a very commonplace person rendered highly respectable through a long life by means of wearing an unchanging fasihon of hat. There is no more respectable nation than the English, and they are famous for their addiction to the high silk hat. There have been certain hats of historic import ance. It does not appear that "the bald first Caesar " wore any, but it is recorded that he put on a wreath of laurel instead, and when he died he did not pull his hat over his eyes, but muffled up his head in his toga. Coming down to more modern times, there was (or rather wasn't, for the tale is a myth) the tyrant Gessler, who elevated his cap on a pole and required his subjects to do it obeisance. The broadbrimmed hat of Rubens is an essential part of his portraits, and a similar article conferred an extra dignity on the small-headed first Stuart, before Cromwell removed that head. The tall bear-skin hats of Napoleon's terrible Old Guard carried victory all over the continent of Europe, and made their last appearance and their first unsuccessful appearance, on the crest of Mt. St. Jean. It was one of the favorite pastimes of their master to stand on the sands of Boulogne and scare the "perfidi

479

ous " English by the sight of his little cocked hat. A great orator, patriot, and statesman once made a triumphal tour of this country, wearing a broadbrimmed slouched hat, and for years afterward the "Kossuth hat" was a favorite article of wear all over this land. > We were led into the foregoing reflections by a portrait of the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge in the July Green Bag. It was the best portrait of his lordship that we ever saw, and we at once recog nized the familiar lineaments of that not-too-fresh piece of head-gear which he wore in America. His lordship was notoriously averse to sitting for his like ness — probably on account of his resemblance to the first Caesar in respect of the natural covering of his head. When he was in this country he gave out no portraits of himself save one taken at a very much earlier period of his life, when the hairy flush of youth was on his honored skull. We should very much like a half-length of him, showing his hands endued in those well-worn black kid gloves, which looked two sizes too large, and as if they had been despotically given out to him by the undertaker on some occasion when he was acting as pall-bearer. Mr. Edmund Yates, his lordship's adroit and unre lenting enemy, is also recently depicted in a "chim ney-pot." But the grandest hat in modern portraiture is that which surmounts Daniel Webster's head in a picture in "The Century" magazine a few years ago. It is truly an awful hat. It looks like a part of the great man, and as if he ate and slept in it. Sidney Smith said that Webster looked like "a Cathedral in breeches," and this hat looms up like the dome of St. Paul's, and his big black eyes gleam mournfully be neath like the windows around its base. It is a wor shipful hat, and shows how a grand character and a superb head can redeem this grotesque article of ap parel from its natural condition of being ridiculous. It would seem that Coleridge and Webster always wore one fashion of hat, and always wore one hat long enough to confer on it the respectability, not to say the grandeur, of antiquity. We know of another portrait of Webster representing him in a lowcrowned, broad-brimmed, straw hat, taking his stately ease at Marshfield, and we have a portrait of Napoleon at St. Helena with a similar hat. These are very impressive presentments, but in them the subject had not to struggle against and assert his native superiority to the ugliest, most inconvenient and most senseless thatch that man's milliners ever arrayed his head withal.

Marlborough. — Among our vacation reading we took up a very agreeable book in which General