The small figures, which appeared to have created the chief consternation, were, we are inclined to believe, very innocent things. There was, it is true, a belief that an individual could be injured or slain by operations on his likeness. There was, however, another purpose connected with Mrs Turner's pursuits to which small jointed images, like artists' lay figures, were used. This was to exhibit the effect of any new fashion, or peculiar style of dress. In this manner small figures, about the size of dolls, were long used in Paris. We have seen people expressing their surprise at pictures of full-grown Frenchwomen examining dolls, but in reality they were not more triflingly occupied than those who now contemplate the latest fashions in their favourite feminine periodical. Mrs Turner was very likely to have occasion for such figures, for she was, with her other pursuits, a sort of dressmaker, or _modiste_; in fact, she seems to have been a ready minister to every kind of human vanity and folly, as well as to a good deal of human wickedness. In the department of dress, she had a name in her own sex and age as illustrious as that of Brummel among dandies in the beginning of this century. As he was the inventor of the starched cravat, she was his precursor in the invention of the starched ruff, or, as it is generally said, of the yellow starch. The best account we have of the starched ruff is by a man who wrote to abuse it. An individual named Stubbes published an _Anatomy of Abuses_. Having become extremely rare, a small impression of it was lately reprinted, as a curious picture of the times. Stubbes dealt trenchantly with everything that savoured of pride and ostentation in dress; and he was peculiarly severe on Mrs Turner's invention, which made the ruff stand against bad weather. He describes the ruffs as having been made 'of cambric Holland lawn; or else of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yard deep; yea, some more--very few less.' He describes with much glee the elementary calamities to which, before the invention of the starch, they were liable. 'If Æolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his storms, chance to hit upon the crazy barque of their bruised ruffs, then they goeth flip-flap in the wind, like rags that flew abroad, lying upon their shoulders like the dish-clout of a slut.' Having thus, with great exultation, described these reproofs to human pride, he mentions how 'the devil, as he, in the fulness of his malice, first invented these great ruffs, so hath he now found out also two great pillars to bear up and maintain this his kingdom of great ruffs--for the devil is king and prince over all the kingdom of pride.' One pillar appears to have been a wire framework--something, perhaps, of the nature of the hoop. The other was 'a certain kind of liquid matter, which they call starch, wherein the devil hath willed them to wash and dye their ruffs well; and this starch they make of