AESTHETIC AS WELL AS TRADITIONAL

Few Seniors, as they are being measured for caps and gowns (somewhat tardily we find), see anything in wearing this traditional academic costume but a pleasing novelty or a foolish tradition. But it is one of the significant customs which emphasizes the age of the College, like the sudden appreciation of the fact that Richelieu was still living when John Harvard gave his foundation fund for the school at "New-towne." Academic gowns originated in English law, for in the fourteenth century our ancestors in the universities at Oxford and Cambridge had apparently fully as varied, and as violent tastes, as the comic supplements assure us are the first characteristic of the modern college man. So England made a law which compelled students to cover their rainbow costumes with a dark robe. Oxford obeyed for a time, but forgot the archaic regulations in more lenient times; Cambridge has always kept them religiously until very recently. Within the last few months the required wearing of the gowns during certain times of the day--even to the restaurant or the theatre--has become irksome, and the student bodies are trying as hard to have the old custom done away with as their authorities are to preserve this link with the past. We find the custom pleasing for its quaintness, and convenient because it is not required, but we should not forget its significance. History may repeat itself and a canary necktie may yet be hidden by a prescribed muffler.