3 6 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



many artists are either ignorant of how Greek drapery is to be 

 produced, or do not care to produce it. This was shown by more 

 than one picture in the last exhibition of the Royal Academy. 



No one who saw the ladies, as finally dressed, hesitated to 

 affirm that the dress really was the dress they were familiar 

 with in statues, and no one denied that it was eminently 

 becoming. The sketches by which I shall illustrate my descrip- 

 tion must be judged leniently, as the work of a mere amateur, 

 and they give little idea of the beauty of the real soft folds 

 hanging on a graceful woman ; they have only the merit of 

 having been carefully drawn from the dress itself, as it actually 

 hung in each case, so that each fold shown had its counterpart 

 in reality : by doing them myself I could best illustrate the 

 points which I wished to bring prominently forward. The fol- 

 lowing is a description of the dress, as finally made and shown 

 in the drawings. The tunic is simply a folded white Indian 

 shawl (called a Chudder, in the language of the shopman), four 

 yards long and two yards wide. This does not require to be 

 cut anywhere ; and, indeed, the result of the experiments was 

 to convince us that the dress was invented before scissors came 

 into use. The shawl is folded in half, lengthways, so as to form 

 a square, the ends being sewn together, with the little fringe 

 turned in. 



The shawl thus doubled is shown in Fig. 1, hanging from a 

 clothes-horse. Let us call the half of the shawl next us the 

 front, and the other half next the clothes-horse the back ; d is 

 at the centre of the front. At two points, a a, equidistant from 

 d, the shawl in the front is gathered together in a kind of bunch 

 of folds and a large gold button sewn on ; the distance between 

 a and a must be somewhat less than the width of the shoulders 

 of the person who is to wear the dress. Opposite a and a, but 

 on the back, two loops are sewn, intended to slip over the 

 buttons and hold the dress round the throat. The distance 

 between the two loops must be considerably less than that 

 between the buttons, otherwise the dress will not hang prettily, 

 with that peculiar fulness always observed in statues : moreover, 

 the loops should not be sewn to the edge of the stuff, but a 

 little piece should be turned in, so as to give a double hold to 

 the loop (capital engineers those old Greek tire-women) ; this 



