his feet. When Francis I. was obliged to
wear his hair short, owing to a wound he received in the head, it became
a prevailing fashion at court. Others, on the contrary, adapted fashions
to set off their peculiar beauties: as Isabella of Bavaria, remarkable
for her gallantry, and the fairness of her complexion, introduced the
fashion of leaving the shoulders and part of the neck uncovered.

Fashions have frequently originated from circumstances as silly as the
following one. Isabella, daughter of Philip II. and wife of the Archduke
Albert, vowed not to change her linen till Ostend was taken; this siege,
unluckily for her comfort, lasted three years; and the supposed colour
of the archduchess's linen gave rise to a fashionable colour, hence
called _l'Isabeau_, or the Isabella; a kind of whitish-yellow-dingy.
Sometimes they originate in some temporary event; as after the battle of
Steenkirk, where the allies wore large cravats, by which the French
frequently seized hold of them, a circumstance perpetuated on the medals
of Louis XIV., cravats were called Steenkirks; and after the battle of
Ramilies, wigs received that denomination.

The _court_, in all ages and in every country, are the modellers of
fashions; so that all the ridicule, of which these are so susceptible,
must fall on them, and not upon their servile imitators the _citizens_.
This complaint is made even so far back as in 1586, by Jean des Caures,
an old French moralist, who, in declaiming against the fashions of his
day, notices one, of the ladies carrying _mirrors fixed to their
waists_, which seemed to employ their eyes in perpetual activity. From
this mode will result, according to honest Des Caures, their eternal
damnation. "Alas! (he exclaims) in what an age do we live: to see such
depravity which we see, that induces them even to bring into church
these _scandalous mirrors hanging about their waists_! Let all
histories, divine, human, and profane, be consulted; never will it be
found that these objects of vanity were ever thus brought into public by
the most meretricious of the sex. It is true, at present none but the
ladies of the court venture to wear them; but long it will not be before
_every citizen's daughter_ and every _female servant_, will have them!"
Such in all times has been the rise and decline of fashion; and the
absurd mimicry of the _citizens_, even of the lowest classes, to their
very ruin, in straining to rival the _newest fashion_, h