DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62267#0123
Ch. IV.
THROUGH ITALY.
113
phrases, which still remain in parliamentary
usage to perpetuate the memory of the Norman
conquest, and to disgrace the lips of the sovereign
even when arrayed in all the majesty of the con-
stitution, would have been suppressed. The
public were then disappointed, but it may not
be too much to expect that a public spirited
sovereign will, ere long, reject both the livery
and the language of a hostile nation, and not
yield in patriotism to an usurper*, who never
appeared in any foreign dress, or listened to any
foreign language. Princes can by example,
ever-y where, and in their own courts, as well as
in all public meetings, by command, establish
whatever dress they may please to adopt; and it
is not a little extraordinary, that they have so
seldom exerted this control which they have
over fashion, in favor of taste, of grace, or of
convenience. Yet a sovereign of Britain need,
not go beyond the bounds of his own empire for
a national dress, both graceful and manly, that
displays at once the symmetry of the form, and
furnishes drapery enough to veil it with majesty.
The reader will perhaps smile when I mention
the Highland dress, not as disfigured in the
* Cromwell, whose foreign correspondence was always
carried on in Latin, and whose dress was that of the cavaliers
of the time.
VOL. IV. I
THROUGH ITALY.
113
phrases, which still remain in parliamentary
usage to perpetuate the memory of the Norman
conquest, and to disgrace the lips of the sovereign
even when arrayed in all the majesty of the con-
stitution, would have been suppressed. The
public were then disappointed, but it may not
be too much to expect that a public spirited
sovereign will, ere long, reject both the livery
and the language of a hostile nation, and not
yield in patriotism to an usurper*, who never
appeared in any foreign dress, or listened to any
foreign language. Princes can by example,
ever-y where, and in their own courts, as well as
in all public meetings, by command, establish
whatever dress they may please to adopt; and it
is not a little extraordinary, that they have so
seldom exerted this control which they have
over fashion, in favor of taste, of grace, or of
convenience. Yet a sovereign of Britain need,
not go beyond the bounds of his own empire for
a national dress, both graceful and manly, that
displays at once the symmetry of the form, and
furnishes drapery enough to veil it with majesty.
The reader will perhaps smile when I mention
the Highland dress, not as disfigured in the
* Cromwell, whose foreign correspondence was always
carried on in Latin, and whose dress was that of the cavaliers
of the time.
VOL. IV. I