ame over with her brother, the Emperor of all the Russias,
and wore on her head, not a coronet--but such a bonnet!

"Ye powers who dress the head, if such there are,
And make the change of woman's taste your care!"

--so Cowper might well have exclaimed, had he been then living. Tell us,
ye gods, whence did her imperial highness derive the idea of her bonnet?
Truly, we can conjecture no other source, than these very words
designating her rank, for the bonnet was imperial--none but such a lady
would have dared to originate it; and it was also high--high indeed! The
crown rose eighteen inches in perpendicular altitude from the nape of
the neck, while the front poke retained the modest dimensions of the
original gipsy hat. We recollect the duchess in Hyde Park with this
monstrous headgear, and the women all in ecstacy at the delightful
novelty. The success of this bonnet was universal--it was a "tremendous
hit," as they say in the play-bills; every woman that could afford it
raised her crown, and Oldenburgized her head. Well, this fashion lasted
tolerably long; it had the great value of rendering public opinion
nearly uniform; but it got old, as all fashions must do, and died a
natural death--not without an heir, a worthy heir. The new idea, you
will perceive, was that of inordinate length, in one way or the other.
The duchess had got it all up aloft--up in her top-royals--the new
bonnet (we really do not know who invented it, but some wicked little
hussy at Paris, no doubt) had it all down below, in the main-sail; the
crown dwindled to nothing, and out went the front poke to exactly the
same length, eighteen inches. This was truly exquisite--every body was
in raptures. The bonnet was tied tight under the chin, and to see a
woman's face you had to look down a sort of semi-funnelled hollow, where
the ambiguous shade of her countenance was illuminated only by the
radiance of her eyes. Here, too, the success was immense; the mothers of
us, the young bloods, the choice spirits of the present day, all wore
bonnets of this kind, when our governors went wooing them in
narrow-brimmed overtopping hats. The next change of any note worth
mentioning, was one of comparatively recent times, such as some of us
may remember their first loves in; it was derived from a partial return
to the primitive round expanded hat, and was in its chief glory, when
that last great piece of French dirty work, the Revolution of 1830, was
perpetrated.