Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 152.djvu/665

The further we travel from the origin of our species the less concern does male humanity show to enhance what share of beauty it may lay claim to, or to screen the ugliness it is generally heir to, by grace of garments. Among civilised and well-to-do men, gala costume has no key-note now but respectability: at weddings as at funerals, at garden-parties as in Parliament, costume is attuned to harmonise with the hurtful cylinder of sable which the supineness of our great-grandfathers allowed the hatters to impose on them as a head-dress, and a hundred hopeless years have but served to bind more tightly on our aching brows. If the chimney-pot hat were comfortable wear—were it sun-proof or rain - proof, or easily carried when not in use—our allegiance to it might be monotonous, but at least it would be intelligible. But, in plain sooth, it is intolerable in sunshine; it is so sensitive of rain-drops that an umbrella must be carried for its special shelter; and, when we travel, it is as difficult to dispose of as a murdered corpse. It cannot be concealed; the accursed thing will fit in with no other portion of our raiment, and must be provided with a special case of grotesque and impracticable shape. In wear or out of wear, we cannot forget its existence nor neglect to make provision for its protection. Cephalalgic humanity has tried every means to be quit of it, but in vain. The creature has not even a serious name, for no one, except the fiend who frames it, knows it as a silk hat; school-boys, with the contempt born of familiarity, call it a “buster” or a “topper”; soldiers, scornfully, a “stove-pipe”; civilians, realistically, a “chimney-pot.” In vain has bountiful Nature provided straw, and human ingenuity fashioned felt: two more perfect substances for head-covering could not have been devised; but, perversely, littering our horses with the one, and roofing our barns with the other, we thrust our thinking organs into unyielding towers of pasteboard. In a simpler age we should have made a god of It—prayed to It, sung to It, bowed to It, propitiated It; but, having adopted monotheism, we are outwardly consistent, and are content to insist on taking it to church with us. The first inhabitant of Mars who visits the Earth, and publishes a volume of travels on his return, will probably describe how, in Western Europe, the possession of a chimney-pot hat is held to be essential to salvation.

There is, at present, no glimmer of hope of escape from it. Even ridicule, most potent of solvents, runs from it like rain from a duck’s back, leaving it intact in all its pompous, gloomy, perpendicular absurdity. Nay, the very derision with which it ought to be treated, is reserved for those who attempt to resist its tyranny. Witness the fate of Mr Keir Hardie (with whom in this, if in nothing else, we are in complete sympathy): did he not take his seat in the new House of Commons wearing on his haughty brow an amorphous arrangement in toast-coloured tweed? which might, indeed, have. been designed on more statesmanlike lines, and conceived to harmonise