224 THE STONES OF VENICE

clothing themselves with it, they might clothe themselves also with modesty and honour;”* consider what nobleness of expression there is in the dress of any of the portrait figures of the great times; nay, what perfect beauty, and more than beauty, there is in the folding of the robe round the imagined form even of the saint or of the angel; and then consider whether the grace of vesture be indeed a thing to be despised. We cannot despise it if we would; and in all our highest poetry and happiest thought we cling to the magnificence which in daily life we disregard. The essence of modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best romances, of Ivanhoe, or Marmion, or the Crusaders, or the Lady of the Lake, is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and costume. Nay, more than this, deprive the Iliad itself of its costume, and consider how much of its power would be lost. And that delight and reverence which we feel in, and by means of, the mere imagination of these accessories, the Middle Ages had in the vision of them; the nobleness of dress exercising, as I have said, a perpetual influence upon character, tending in a thousand ways to increase dignity and self-respect, and, together with grace of gesture, to induce serenity of thought.

§ 32. I do not mean merely in its magnificence; the most splendid time was not the best time. It was still in the thirteenth century,-when, as we have seen, simplicity and gorgeousness were justly mingled, and the “leathern girdle and the clasp of bone”¹ were worn, as well as the embroidered mantle,-that the manner of dress seems to have been noblest. The chain mail of the knight, flowing and falling over his

* Vol. II. Appendix 7 [Vol. X. p. 447].

painters in dress patterns is noted; and Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 189); and A Joy for Ever, § 54, in which passages the importance of beautiful dress is insisted upon from the point of view of portraiture and historical painting. See also the letters on dress collected in Arrows of the Chace, at vol. ii. pp. 226 seq. of the 1880 edition.]

¹ [Dante: for the full passage, see Vol. X. p. 307.]

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