text: 's courtiers must have gone slopping and spirting about in the mud that befouled their streets as well as ours! What queer figures they must have cut on horseback in a rainy day with the water running off from the pendulous tips of their shoes! Nevertheless there was something good in the arrangement of the upper part of the shoe or half-boot of those times and even of earlier days as any one who reads the _Art-Union_ or who knows the history of British costume can tell