reformation of stage costume, played King Lear in a habit intended to look ancient, while Reddish in Edgar, and Palmer in the Bastard, were in full-dress suits of their own day; and the Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia of the tragedy in hoops! Richard the Third, also, was played by Garrick in a fancy dress, which Hogarth has handed down to us; * but Richmond, and the rest, wore the English uniforms of the eighteenth century: and as to Macbeth, Garrick played it to the last in a court-suit of sky-blue and scarlet! Behold him, engraved from the picture in Mr. Mathew's collection, wherein the great little Roscius looks much more like Diggory in "All the World's a Stage," than the thane of Glamis. It is now with the whole collection at the Garrick Club. In Jeffrey's "Collection of Dresses," a work in two volumes quarto, published in 1757, the editor says in his preface, "As to the stage-dresses, it is only necessary to remark that they are at once elegant and characteristic; and amongst many other regulations of more importance, for which the public is obliged to the genius and judgment of the present manager of our principal theatre, (Mr. Garrick,

* The hat which he wore in this character being adorned with feathers and mock jewels, was thought a great prize by some bailiffs who were rummaging poor Fleetwood's theatre. Garrick's man,

David, trembling for his master's finery, sputtered out, "Holloa, gentlemen! take care what you are about: now look ye, that hat you have taken away belongs to the King; and when he misses it, there'll be the devil and all to pay." The bailiffs taking it, as David meant they should, for the property of King George instead of King Richard, immediately returned it with a thousand apologies for the mistake. Vide Cooke's Memoirs of Macklin, 8vo. London, 1806, p. 147.

who entered on the management of Drury Lane in 1747,) is that of the dresses, which are no longer the heterogeneous and absurd mixtures of foreign and ancient modes which formerly debased our tragedies, by representing a Roman general in a full-bottomed peruke, and the sovereign of an Eastern empire in trunk-hose." Now, to say nothing of the fact that the very absurdities specified were then, and continued to be for some years afterwards, in existence, let us for Heaven's sake look at the specimens he gives us of the elegant and characteristic costumes introduced by the genius and judgment of Garrick: Per

dita, in "The Winter's Tale," in a long stomacher, and a hoop festooned with flowers; and Comus, in a stiffskirted coat, over which is worn what he calls "a robe of pink sattin, puft with silver gauze, fastened over the shoulder with a black velvet sash, adorned with jewels. The jacket," as he calls the coat aforesaid, "is of white curtained sattin. The collar is black velvet, set with jewels, and the boots are blue sattin!" But the figure should be seen to be appreciated. Here it is! Fancy an actor now walking on the stage in such dress for Comus!

Behold also the dress of Zara in the " Mourning Bride," from the same collection!

A pamphlet, entitled "The Dramatic Execution of Agis," published on the production of Mr. Homes' tragedy of that name in 1758, contains a severe attack on Garrick for "disguising himself (a Grecian chief) in the dress of a modern Venetian gondolier;" and ridicules his having introduced "a popish procession made up of white friars, with some other moveables, like a bishop, des enfans de chœur, nuns, &c." into a play, the scene of which lies in ancient Sparta! So much for the judgment and taste of Garrick in dramatic costume.

Shortly after this period, it began to be the custom on the revival of old plays to advertise in the bills, that the characters would be dressed "in the habits of the times." A friend informs us that he remembers such notices as early as 1762, the year of his first coming to London; but the earliest we have ourselves been able to meet with is dated Nov. 8th. 1775, on the occasion of the revival of a play called "Old City Manners;” and a similar advertisement occurs early in 1776, on the revival of Ben Jonson's "Epicene, or the Silent Woman," when Mrs. Siddons supported the principal character. Henderson, the immediate successor of Garrick, instead of improving the taste of his brethren in this particular, set them the most wretched example in his own person. "He paid not," says Mr. Boaden,* "the slightest attention to costume, and was indifferent even as to the neatness of his dress. He never looked even to the linings of the suits he wore, and once boasted that he had played, I think, ten characters consecutively in the same coat." Macklin's costume in Shylock has been preserved to us by the pencil of Zoffany. A large unfinished picture by that artist, of the trial-scene in the "Merchant of Venice," now in the possession of Mr. Dominic Colnaghi of Pall-Mall East, presents us with Macklin in a dress not very dissimilar in general appearance to that worn by the actors of Shylock at the present day; but Antonio is in a full court suit of black, and the senators in scarlet gowns, with large powdered wigs; which latter, though certainly worn by Venetian senators in the eighteenth century, were as certainly unknown to them in 1594, *In his "Life of Kemble."