are some women who will never be satisfied with any number of wedding-rings under a bushel.

How we were dressed on the auspicious occasion of our picnic at Netley you may imagine, my dear, from a reference to the little pencil drawing, which with a trembling hand I have sketched out for you. Put it in your album; years hence the croquis may prove a curiosity to your children, if the fashion-books of 1817 are inaccessible to them. Indeed, I think those same books full of coloured engravings ought to be burnt in iron cages at stated periods, like the paid-in notes of the Bank of England, in order that we might not have to blush in after life for the egregious follies in costume we perpetrated in our youth. When I look at the modern dress and bonnet of a friend pretty well advanced in years, I can scarcely realise to myself the possibility of her, and of I, ever having worn the astonishing garments I can remember so distinctly. And young as you are, dear, who would dream of dressing a child in 1859 as you were dressed a dozen years since? So you see us all as we were on the sward at Netley forty-one years since ;-in the days we wore no crinoline, a long time ago. There are Masters Reefer and Hawsehole, the middies, with their Byron collars, their dirks and tagged hats, such as Shanko Fanko my page wears to-day. There is Captain Sappin of the Buffs, with his epaulettes-there are no epaulettes now-his swallow-tailed coat-they have now put the Buffs into tunics, like little boys-and the long feather swaggering over his shako. There are Ensigns Chopstick and Grounter, of the H. Militia, in cocked hats, white turn-backs, kerseymere smalls and gaiters. And the girls! and the ladies! Look at Mrs. Lintot, with her hat and feathers, and her eternal amber satin pelisse. Look at the three Misses Hardy, with their coal-scuttle bonnets, their lavender boots, their short sleeves,

and their waists underneath their armpits. Look at her who was once Constance Sevignier, and is now poor old Lady Chesterfield, with a vandyked robe, a coral necklace, a little boa-my chest was always delicate, my love—a muff, long gloves, and a sash. Yes; I assure you I have worn all these things. I have worn, besides, a gipsy hat, to see it abandoned, and then brought into fashion again twenty years afterwards; worn a leghorn hat with a monstrous superstructure of gauze, bows and artificial flowers, and broad streamers of ribbon that hung down like the crisscross pendants of a Cardinal's hat. Worn a hat with a turned-up brim, a stove-pipe tube and a bell crown, with a cockade at the side like that of an officer's groom. Worn a beaver bonnet, a "Persian head-dress," and turban (at evening parties), with a bird of paradise or a marabout feather stuck in it. Worn boots with fur round the tops, Polish boots, bronze boots, white satin boots, shoes with crossed sandals, and open-worked stockings. Worn skirts that dragged on the ground, and skirts that ended an inch above my ankles. Worn short sleeves, long sleeves, full sleeves, light sleeves, Bishop sleeves, leg-of-mutton sleeves-the grovelling menfolk, true to their creed in earthly things, have lately assumed them for trousers, and call them "pegtops "-Mameluke sleeves, hanging sleeves, and scarcely any sleeves at all. Worn cloaks, mantillas, pelisses, scarfs, capes, pelerines, jackets, rough coats, burnouses, and shawls. Worn gloves that came to the elbows, and lace tippets with ends that reached to the feet. Carried fans, muffs, reticules, sacs; pockets before and pockets behind; purses in the bosom and purses in the hand. Known the time when it was fashionable or unfashionable to display the gold watch and seals of which one's husband had made one a present. Worn plain collars, worked collars, no collars at all; black velvet bands, ribbons

tied in bows, victorines, berthes, lappets, cuffs, braceletsnow two on each arm, now three on one and none on the other-sleeve buttons, mittens, fur gloves, cameos, garnet brooches, crosses, true-lover's knots, golden arrows, Brighton pebbles, chatelaines-with miniature gridirons, tea-kettles, and flat-irons; long parasols, short parasols-some with fringe and some without, some lined with satin and some covered with lace. Worn dresses that mounted to the throat, and dresses that slid off the shoulders; worn falls and tuckers, and chemisettes, and ruches and drawn bodies and stomachers, and any number of flowers, and pink slips, and barége skirts, and dress improvers, and twilled aprons, and three tucks-worn, in short, and in my time, hundreds of variations of that tune which Folly and Vanity have been playing for five thousand years on the first simple motivo of our grandmother Eve's vestment of fig-leaves. Crinoline was coming in, and it was beginning to be observed that the Paris cab-horses were losing their tails from the increased demand for horsehair, when I was taken away from the world and cast, fettered, on to the sofa here.

I remember the first symptoms of the crinoline malady and mania. Crinoline has nothing whatsoever to do with the hoops and paniers that our great-great-grandmothers wore under their brocaded dresses with the sharply-peaked stomachers. The detestable structures of cane and whalebone in which our servant-maids spend their wages, in order that they may distend their dresses to the similitude of hen-coops, are not crinoline properly so called, and the name has been impertinently arrogated for such substitutes. The original crinoline was in the first an aggravation of the "dress-improver," or bustle. Bustles themselves, I dare say, are not much younger than Noah's ark; but our modern bustle dates from the time of the Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited at the

Egyptian Hall some half-score years before you were born. Previous to this time we had attired ourselves in the sham-classical manner so greatly favoured by the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte, his chief painter M. David, and his chief actor M. Talma. Till long after the Peace of '15 we wore short waists, narrow skirts-were as flat, laterally and otherwise, as pancakes, and sat on hard chairs and settees, with slim, carved, uncomfortable legs of classical design. This was the "Style Empire" in dress and furniture. Madame Récamier, Lady Morgan, Lady Caroline Lamb, the Duchesse de Berri, Lady Jersey, Lady Conyngham, the gorgeous Pauline Borghese (a Buonaparte), Madame Catalani, Miss Stephens-you may see her portrait, she is now a Dowager Countess, in Harlowe's picture of the Trial of Queen Catherine all the great beauties, and leaders and followers of fashion of the first score years of the century, wore this long, narrow-skirted, short-waisted, pancake-flattened, hideous classical costume. Caroline of Brunswick, a large-boned woman, and given, moreover, to corpulence, amplified this long narrow sack dress by means of a loose over-pelisse. She widened herself at the top with a hat and feathers; but it was the advent of the Hottentot Venus that caused things to be widened at the other extremity. That sable phenomenon, whose skeleton is now in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, was blessed with a most remarkable rotundity of person. She had, perhaps, the largest natural bustle that ever was known; and the English ladies, long since doomed to and groaning under the tyranny of flat pancake skirts, envied the breadth of beam of her who had come for fashion's good from Caffraria's sultry climes. The Hottentot's rotundity became the rage. The Venus visited Paris-she died there, I believe, poor over-fed creature-and there received the cachet of the Archpriestesses of fashion.

The bustle was, if not invented, at least re-discovered, and soon obtained astonishing vogue. It was at first a species of pillow-roll, or pudding, stuffed and covered, and secured round the waist with strings. Of course, like everything else that we poor oppressed women choose to wear, in order to adorn our persons for the delectation of the Tyrant Man, the satirical gentlemen soon had their fling at the bustle. Mr. Theodore Crookback wrote some cruel, laughable couplets about it; Mr. Cruikshank caricatured it in his funny, wicked etchings; and the people at the playhouses took it off in the pantomimes. Everything great and good has so been satirised and turned into ridicule. The bustle came out of the ordeal triumphant. Ladies dropped it sometimes in the street, and rude boys picking it up made jokes upon it; but it survived even that injury. Little by little it began to be admitted that the bustle was a marvellous improvement to the set of the folds of ladies' drapery, and that while it confirmed amplitude it could give grace and elegance of form. Gradually, too, people discovered that it was not absolutely necessary that the "dress-improver" should be a stuffed pillow or pudding, and that a structure of horsehair, buckram, or some equally stiff material, would answer the purpose of distending the garments quite as well. There was a long and fierce combat between the semi-rigid fabrics, but horsehair had the best of it in the long run; and that horsehair, my dear, is no other than the now world-famous crinoline.

The horsehair bustle assumed a new phase of expansion in the shape of one, two, or more tiers of puffs, beneath which extended downwards a row of semicircular volutes, or columnar corrugations. The whole fabric resembled equally a horsehair Dutch-oven, and that curious wooden screen placed on the stage behind the footlights at the Opera-house to shelter the musical prompter. I mentioned, I think, a

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