“But when a tall son of Anak appeared in the little bodice of a coat, stuck upon the hips; and still worse, when some very clumsy forms assumed the dress, and one in particular, that I remember, who was equally huge in person and coarse in manners, whose taste, or economy, or both,—­the one as probably as the other,—­had led him to the choice of an ugly pepper-and-salt, instead of the true Oxford mix, or whatever the standard gray was called, and whose tailor, or tailoress, probably a tailoress, had contrived to aggravate his natural disproportions by the most awkward fit imaginable,—­then indeed you might have said that ’some of nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.’  They looked like David’s messengers, maltreated and sent back by Hanun.[23]

“The consequence was, the dress was unpopular; very few adopted it; and the society itself went quietly into oblivion.  Nevertheless it had done some good; it had had a visible effect in checking extravagance; and had accomplished all it would have done, I imagine, had it continued longer.

“There was a time, some three or four years previous to this, when a rakish fashion began to be introduced of wearing white-topped boots.  It was a mere conceit of the wearers, such a fashion not existing beyond College,—­except as it appeared in here and there an antiquated gentleman, a venerable remnant of the olden time, in whom the boots were matched with buckles at the knee, and a powdered queue.  A practical satire quickly put an end to it.  Some humorists proposed to the waiters about College to furnish them with such boots on condition of their wearing them.  The offer was accepted; a lot of them was ordered at a boot-and-shoe shop, and, all at once, sweepers, sawyers, and the rest, appeared in white-topped boots.  I will not repeat the profaneness of a Southerner when he first observed a pair of them upon a tall and gawky shoe-black striding across the yard.  He cursed the ‘negro,’ and the boots; and, pulling off his own, flung them from him.  After this the servants had the fashion to themselves, and could buy the article at any discount.”—­pp. 127-129.

At Union College, soon after its foundation, there was enacted a law, “forbidding any student to appear at chapel without the College badge,—­a piece of blue ribbon, tied in the button-hole of the coat.”—­Account of the First Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the Philomathean Society, Union College, 1847.

Such laws as the above have often been passed in American colleges, but have generally fallen into disuse in a very few years, owing to the predominancy of the feeling of democratic equality, the tendency of which is to narrow, in as great a degree as possible, the intervals between different ages and conditions.

See COSTUME.