an irresponsible climate, and the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City civilisation.  And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches.  It is almost as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester.  Cabinet Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive.  It would not be the first time that such a result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary.  I remember that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was that the wig went out of fashion.  People were afraid to wear wigs that might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection.  But the wig returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in The Rivals there is an early hint of its final disappearance.  There was never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it began, as the “Alexandra limp” of our youth began, in snobbery.  Was it not a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair?  This aping of the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue.  When Lady Percy in Henry IV. is lamenting Hotspur she says:—­

        ... he was, indeed, the glass
    Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves. 
    He had no legs that practised not his gait;
    And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
    Became the accents of the valiant;
    For those that could speak low and tardily,
    Would turn their own perfection to abuse. 
    To seem like him.

In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of the war.  The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield.  I don’t think women have shared this feeling to the same extent.  I am told there were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter.  But, perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus.  And they may be right.  We had better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable change.  Let us enjoy it without boasting.

Our enjoyment may be short-lived.  We must not be surprised if this incredible hat returns in triumph with peace.  It has survived the blasts of many centuries and infinite changes of fashion.  It is, I suppose, the most ancient survival in the dress that men wear.  There is in the Froissart collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the Barbary corsairs.  And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour.  They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats!  And it may be that when Macaulay’s New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s, he will sit under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.