The present, perhaps, is not an inappropriate place for a few general observations on costume, considered with reference to art.  It has never been more accurately observed than in the present day; art has become a slop-shop for pedantic antiquities.  This is because we live in a learned and critical, but by no means poetical age.  The ancients before us used, when they had to represent the religions of other nations which deviated very much from their own, to bring them into conformity with the Greek mythology.  In Sculpture, again, the same dress, namely, the Phrygian, was adopted, once for all, for every barbaric tribe.  Not that they did not know that there were as many different dresses as nations; but in art they merely wished to acknowledge the great contrast between barbarian and civilized:  and this, they thought, was rendered most strikingly apparent in the Phrygian garb.  The earlier Christian painters represent the Savior, the Virgin Mary, the Patriarchs, and the Apostles in an ideal dress, but the subordinate actors or spectators of the action in the dresses of their own nation and age.  Here they were guided by a correct feeling:  the mysterious and sacred ought to be kept at an awe-inspiring distance, but the human cannot be rightly understood if seen without its usual accompaniments.  In the middle ages all heroical stories of antiquity, from Theseus and Achilles down to Alexander, were metamorphosed into true tales of chivalry.  What was related to themselves spoke alone an intelligible language to them; of differences and distinctions they did not care to know.  In an old manuscript of the Iliad, I saw a miniature illumination representing Hector’s funeral procession, where the coffin is hung with noble coats of arms and carried into a Gothic church.  It is easy to make merry with this piece of simplicity, but a reflecting mind will see the subject in a very different light.  A powerful consciousness of the universal validity and the solid permanency of their own manner of being, an undoubting conviction that it has always so been and will ever continue so to be in the world—­these feelings of our ancestors were symptoms of a fresh fulness of life; they were the marrow of action in reality as well as in fiction.  Their plain and affectionate attachment to everything around them, handed down from their fathers, is by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages of mannerism, for they, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes and fashion of the day into art, because to them everything like noble simplicity seems boorish and rude.  The latter impropriety is now abolished:  but, on the other hand, our poets and artists, if they would hope for our approbation, must, like servants, wear the livery of distant centuries and foreign nations.  We are everywhere at home except at home.  We do ourselves the justice to allow that the present mode of dressing, forms of politeness, etc., are altogether unpoetical, and art is therefore obliged to beg, as an alms, a poetical costume from the antiquaries.  To that simple way of thinking, which is merely attentive to the inward truth of the composition, without stumbling at anachronisms or other external inconsistencies, we cannot, alas! now return; but we must envy the poets to whom it offered itself; it allowed them a great breadth and freedom in the handling of their subject.