Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/298

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248
COSTUME
CHAP. XX

figure at fancy-dress balls tor months after the production of this dainty little play. Miss Letty Lind, Miss Kate Vaughan, and Miss Jessie Milward—I take my examples at random—may all be counted pioneers. To Kate Vaughan we owe the lace-frilled petticoat, beneath the influence of which she daintily danced her way into public favour. Miss Letty Lind first wore the accordion-pleated dancing skirt, and Miss Jessie Milward popularised the lawm-embroidered collars and cuffs. I forget which Adelphi melodrama she graced with these trifles, but I am safe in asserting that she was the heroine of the drama, and was made happy by wedding bells as the curtain fell.

It is easy for me to let my pictures in this chapter give me my cues for dilating on specially splendid productions which it has been my privilege to enjoy, for Mr. Anderson has been responsible for the majority of these, and his pencil has illuminated the various centuries with experience, infinite care, and a skill of which I have promised him faithfully not to speak.

An exception, however, was Coriolanus at the Lyceum, a play lending itself pre-eminently to dignified interpretation, and it is needless to say that Sir Henry Irving saw that it got this. Perhaps the great actor never looked more imposing than in the military robes of dull red and leopard skins, with a cuirass of richly-wrought gold, though, to be sure, he always wore his ecclesiastical garb with the grand air, and as Wolsey, Richelieu, and Becket he embodied the venerable magnificence of established holiness.

Miss Ellen Terry, as Volumnia, also personified dignity, whether in a loose garb of purple silk,