The first is to the admonitory effect that “à la femme altière, méchante, impérieuse, on est tenté d’offrir une culotte.” The second is still more salubrious of character, and observance of it will prove highly efficacious. “Une femme qui porte les culottes,” says a melancholy and married philosopher, “ne peut marcher longtemps sans tomber.” And now to my promised anecdotes. A gentleman once said, in defence of Shakspeare, that his vulgar characters, though low, were natural. Voltaire, to whom this was said, observed the advantage to be derived from such an assertion by one who, like himself, hated Shakspeare:—“Avec permission, mon derrière est bien dans la nature, et cependant je porte culotte.” This illustration reminds me of a stage pair of breeches, which, some eighty years ago, had wellnigh killed that fair and fairly-reputable actress, Miss Maria Macklin. She was famous for her male characters, and for her taste in dressing them; Dejazet has not a better taste in this respect. But Miss Macklin unfortunately had not only worn the male garment repeatedly, but she was in the habit of buckling the garter portion of it so tightly, that the result was a large and dangerous swelling in the knee, which, we are told by Kirkman and Cooke, “from _motives of delicacy_, she would not suffer to be examined till it had increased to an alarming size!” An operation however was successfully performed, and she bore it courageously; but she never regained her strength, and she died the victim of false delicacy and a little vanity. But, false or not, her delicacy was very like that of Mary of Burgundy, who died in consequence of over-modesty, in concealing an injury in the thigh, caused by a fall from a horse. Mary’s husband, Maximilian, had his delicate scruples too,—that is, on one point—the point of putting on a shirt, which he would never do in the presence of a _valet_. The idea of doing what Louis XIV. so regularly did,—namely, put on a shirt, and that sometimes a rather dirty one, in presence of a roomful of people,—would have made the modest and moneyless Maximilian turn pale with disgust. Perhaps however Maximilian hated shirts, because they were not of German invention. Like the old gentleman in the ‘Wasps’ of Aristophanes, who, being desired to put on a pair of Lacedæmonian boots, excuses himself on the plea that one of his toes is πάνυ μισολάκωυ—altogether hostile to the Lacedæmonians; a bit of wit, by the way, which honest Sheridan has fitted on to the character of Acres, who hates French dancing terms for the reason that his feet don’t understand _pas_ this and _pas_ that; and that he decidedly has most “Anti-Gallican toes.” This expression is decidedly a plagiarism from the admirable low-comedy scene in the ‘Wasps,’ where good Master Bdelycleon so daintily dresses his father Philocleon, the Athenian Dicast, and gallantly compliments him at last, by comparing him to “a boil covered with garlic.”