s, and acts as a
kind of dependent drapery to compensate for the concealment of the
hair. Here is also the reason why the common hat is so frightful; it
gives us straight or nearly straight lines, going upwards like
tangents from the oval of the face, and cut off above by another
straight line (the section of the crown) at right angles: all such
lines and angles are foreign to the face and head. The common nightcap
is too familiar, the common hat too stiff. Observe the lines of the
face and head; the projection of the nose, the rounded angularity of
the chin; the vertical section of the head affording curves with
decided yet harmonious irregularities; the horizontal section
producing a nearly regular contour. Well, it is upon principles of
this kind that the covering of the head should be beautified. Now, we
profess ourselves unable to make any better reconciliation of the
useful with the beautiful for this purpose, than in the small,
flexible, light, and broad-brimmed hat, which is still to be found in
some Spanish and Italian pictures; a hat not quite so large as that
worn in the reign of Charles I., yet with all its freedom and
capability of assuming a variety of graceful forms; not so stiff as
the beaux of the Spanish court, and the rakes of our own merry
monarch's palace made it; not so formal as we know James I. and Lord
Bacon used to wear; but something between all these three types. The
prevalence of straight lines in it should be avoided without its
appearing slovenly, and its dimensions should be such as to consult
convenience without relapsing into a homely vulgarity. Such a kind of
hat admits of any further ornament which the fancy of the wearer may
induce him to add; a feather, a band, a buckle, or even a plain button
for occasionally looping up the brim on one side or other, (not two
sides, for it would return to the old cocked hat,)--any of these
extraneous additions would harmonize, and would be in due character
with its shape. Such a hat would certainly be useful; and that it
would be ornamental we have only to decide by consulting our eyes, and
by looking at our ancestors' portraits of the seventeenth century.

But there is another kind of covering for the head, which, for its
peculiar purposes, seems to us more useful and more ornamental even
than this hat; we allude to the common round travelling cap, the
officers' undress cap in the British army. Are you going a journey?
have you any rough work to