And it is not only gastronomic taste which seems so much the subject of habit.  That hat that was so absolute a thing last year is as dowdy and impossible to-day as if it had been the fashion of the Babylonians.  It has always been so.  “We had scarce worn cloth one year at the Court,” says Montaigne, “what time we mourned for our King Henrie the Second, but certainly in every man’s opinion all manner of silks were already become so vile and abject that was any man seen to wear them he was presently judged to be some countrie fellow or mechanical man.”  And you remember that in Utopia gold was held of so small account by comparison with iron that it was used for the baser purposes of the household.

We are adaptable creatures, and easily make our tastes conform to our environment and our customs.  There are certain savage tribes who wear rings through their noses.  When Mrs. Brown, of Tooting, sees pictures of them she remarks to Mr. Brown on the strange habits of these barbarous people.  And Mr. Brown, if he has a touch of humour in him, points to the rings hanging from Mrs. Brown’s ears, and says:  “But, my dear, why is it barbarous to wear a ring in the nostril and civilised to wear rings in the ears?” The dilemma is not unlike that of the savage tribe whom the Greeks induced to give up cannibalism.  But when the cannibals, who had piously eaten their parents, were asked instead to adopt the Greek custom of burning the bodies they were horrified at the suggestion.  They would cease to eat them; but burn them?  No.  I can imagine Mrs. Brown’s savages agreeing to take the rings out of their noses, but refusing blankly to put them in their ears.

I have no doubt that the long-haired Cavaliers used to regard the short hair of the Puritans as the “limit” in bad taste, but the man who today dares to walk down the Strand with hair streaming down his back is looked at as a curiosity and a crank, and we all join in that delightful addition to the Litany which Moody invented:  “From long-haired men and short-haired women, Good Lord, deliver us.”  But who shall say that our children will not reverse the prayer?

Even in my own brief span I have seen men’s faces pass through every hirsute change under the Protean influence of “good taste.”  I remember when, to be really a student of good form, a man wore long side-whiskers of the Dundreary type.  Then “mutton chops” and a moustache were the thing; then only a moustache; now we have got back to the Romans and the clean shave.  But where is the absolute “good taste” in all this?  Or take trousers.  If you had lived a hundred years ago and had dared to go about in trousers instead of knee-breeches you would have been written down a vulgar fellow.  Even the great Duke of Wellington in 1814 was refused admittance to Almack’s because he presented himself in trousers.  Now we relegate knee-breeches to fancy dress balls and Court functions.