vili building what it ought to be. This external beauty is the clothes. As long as human civilization continues, custumes will be there, organically connected with our modes of living. Heace a study of the custumes is as important as the study of any other facet of human life. No literature worth the name could ignore it. After all, literature and the other arts are but the off springs of the artist's passion for life, a faller life, and his inexhaustible interest in representing it in the artefacts. In fact even a superficial survey of the literatures of the world reveals the astonishing fact that the modes of dressing of the individual literary characters and personalities have a significant bearing not only on their individual lives but on the thematic organization of the literary works also. It is not uncommon to come across a change in the course of events, an unexpected shift in emphasis, a dramatic appeal to the readers, a felt compulsion and immediacy in the evolution and interrelatedness of life portrayed in the works of art due solely to the costume styles which the writer conceives for the people of his artistic world. In the hands of matured artists it is much more than this. The adoptation of a particular kiad of dress may give an unmis takable clue to the unfathoming of the very conception of the writer that underlies the overall thematic structure of the work. The garments worn by the characters have been used by many poets as a rich source of creating images and symbois. The in- ward greatness or littleness of a man could be judged through his outward appearance, the obvious manifestation of which is his dress. It is not for nothing that Shakespeare has given considerable importance to the robes and crowns and jewels and garments in his plays wherein live the universal man and woman. They may give a clue toward unravelling the puzzle behind his overriding concern with kings and nobles and courts. The assignment of garments and ornaments to his characters is not the result of any arbitrary conventious. For Shakespeare, for that matter, for most of the writers of the Classical age crowns and robes, rich costumes and jewels were the fitting out- ward manifestations of the person's inward majesty. Such
