Nay, to make the difference still more visible, they wore caps of ermine powdered. But they were mistaken in their politics, for the cits soon got them. Then they trumpt up another mode, and black quoiss came into play. But the ladies within Ludgate not only aped them in this fashion, but added thereto a gold embroidery and jewels. Formerly the court dames took a great deal of pains in combing up their hair from their foreheads and temples to make a tower; but they were soon weary of that, for it was not long before this fashion too was got into Cheapside. After this they let their hair fall loose about their foreheads; but the city gossips soon followed them in that." And this game, we may add, has been kept up from that day to this; nor does either party yet show any inclination to retire from the contest. Erasmus was, indeed, an unmerciful satirist of women. In his "Praise of Folly" he returns to the charge again and again. "That which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the extreme stupidness and folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably simple, that for any of them to thrust forward and reach at the name of wise is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, _That an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple_; so a woman will be a woman, _i. e._, a fool, whatever disguise she takes up." And again: "Good God! what frequent divorces, or worse mischief, would oft sadly happen, except man and wife were so discreet as to pass over light occasions of quarrel with laughing, jesting, dissembling, and such like playing the fool? Nay, how few matches would go forward, if the hasty lover did but first know how many little tricks of lust and wantonness (and perhaps more gross failings) his coy and seemingly bashful mistress had oft before been guilty of? And how fewer marriages, when consummated, would continue happy, if the husband were not either sottishly insensible of, or did not purposely wink at and pass over, the lightness and forwardness of his good-natured wife?" [Illustration: American Lady walking in the Snow. "I have often shivered at seeing a young beauty picking her way through the snow with a pale rose-colored bonnet set on the very top of her head. They never wear muffs or boots, even when they have to step to their sleighs over ice and snow. They walk in the middle of winter with their poor little toes pinched into a miniature slipper, incapable of excluding as much moisture as might bedew a primrose."--MRS. TROLLOPE, _Domestic Manners of the Americans_, vol. ii., p. 135. 1830.]