Now, seeing that our change of fashions is so prompt and sudden, that the inventions of all the tailors in the world cannot furnish out new whim-whams enow to feed our vanity withal, there will often be a necessity that the despised forms must again come in vogue, these immediately after fall into the same contempt; and that the same judgment must, in the space of fifteen or twenty years, take up half-a-dozen not only divers but contrary opinions, with an incredible lightness and inconstancy; there is not any of us so discreet, who suffers not himself to be gulled with this contradiction, and both in external and internal sight to be insensibly blinded.
I wish to muster up here some old customs that I have in memory, some of them the same with ours, the others different, to the end that, bearing in mind this continual variation of human things, we may have our judgment more clearly and firmly settled.
The thing in use amongst us of fighting with rapier and cloak was in practice amongst the Romans also: "Sinistras sagis involvunt, gladiosque distringunt," ["They wrapt their cloaks upon the left arm, and drew their swords."-- De Bello Civili, i.

75.] says Caesar; and he observes a vicious custom of our nation, that continues yet amongst us, which is to stop passengers we meet upon the road, to compel them to give an account who they are, and to take it for an affront and just cause of quarrel if they refuse to do it.
At the Baths, which the ancients made use of every day before they went to dinner, and as frequently as we wash our hands, they at first only bathed their arms and legs; but afterwards, and by a custom that has continued for many ages in most nations of the world, they bathed stark naked in mixed and perfumed water, looking upon it as a great simplicity to bathe in mere water.

The most delicate and affected perfumed themselves all over three or four times a day.

They often caused their hair to be pinched off, as the women of France have some time since taken up a custom to do their foreheads, "Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod brachia veilis," ["You pluck the hairs out of your breast, your arms, and thighs." -- Martial, ii.

62, i.] though they had ointments proper for that purpose: "Psilotro nitet, aut acids latet oblita creta." ["She shines with unguents, or with chalk dissolved in vinegar." -- Idem, vi.