86 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



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, en- 

 graved from the picture in Mr. Mathews' 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, who entered on the management of Drury Lane in 1747), 

 is that of the dresses, which are no longer the heterogeneous and absurd mix- 

 ture 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 after- 

 wards 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 judg- 

 ment of Garrick : Perdita in ' The Winter's Tale/ in a long stomacher, and 

 a hoop festooned with flowers ; and Comus, in a stiff- skirted 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 afofesaid, ' is of white curtained sattin. The collar is of 

 black velvet, set with jewels, and the boots are blue sattin !' 



" 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 chceur, 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 1 762, 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 oc- 

 casion of the revival of a play called ' Old City Manners ; ' and a similar ad- 

 vertisement occurs early in 1776, on the revival of Ben Jonson's ' Epecene, 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, in his Life of Kemble, 

 ' the slightest attention to costume, and was indifferent even as to the neat- 

 ness 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 Pail-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, when the play was written, and to which period the language and man- 

 ners are alone appiopriate. 



" Mr. John Kernble, the first real reformer of stage costume, was introduced 

 to the London public in the character of Hamlet. But he then played the 



