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ix costumes of the characters along with their other outward grandeurs may indicate something of the conception of human being by the writer as a supreme being and also they many point toward the artist's vision of the amplitude and greatness of human life., The modern writer's preoccupation with the commonplace souls and their unglamourous adventures, and their ultimate conception of human soul as commonplace and its emotions as mean may be reflected among other things by the attire assigned to the characters. Consequently, a compara- tive study of the costume-pattern of the characters in a literature of one epoch with that of another epoch, of the costumes used by one cultural group with that of another may lead toward the discovery of valuable materials for a historical and sociological study of the peoples of different ages and cultures. Agaio, as Dr. Sachidand Sahay puts it, rightly, "Dress is the most eminet form of individual as well as racial self-expres- sion. It is at the same time an excellent embodiment of their sense of beauty..... For individual self expression no human activity affords so much scope to the average man or woman as does dress or personal adornments" (Indian Custume Coiffure and Ornament, Delhi, 1971 p.1.3 It is not only that One's way of dressing may, in unmistakable terms, determine one's tastes and temperaments in general and one's aesthegtic sense in parti cular. The more subtie and finer spheres of human life like love and sensuousness are, at least in a limited way, organically connected with one's self-expression through one's costumes. Or, to put it precisely, one's manner of dressing may help us to judge though not dicisively, one's whole mode of aesthetic. living. Applying the principle of reductive process, we may even go to the extent of saying that this style in dressing may have a hearing on one's material existence too, since one's wordly living and aesthetic living are not unrelated to one another. So much for the relationship of dress with life and literature. A detailed study of the evolution of costumes among different cultural groups may bring to the fore bitherto unexplored