Since the beginning of the present century, the laws of fashion have been more stringent, those of taste ever execrable. Taste, in its true sense, and as applied to costume, has never of late been “The admiration Of this short-coated population,— This sew’d-up race, this button’d nation,— Who, while they boast their laws so free, Leave not one limb at liberty; But live, with all their lordly speeches, The slaves of buttons and tight breeches.” Even George IV. and his favourites could not bless or curse the nation with a taste for dress. After all, we are better off in that respect than the Italians of the last century, who were accustomed to walk abroad without hats, and with parasols and fans; and we do not desire to see Kensington Gardens like that at Schesmedscher, near Bucharest, of the figures on which gay stage the correspondent of the ‘Daily News’ thus graphically speaks:— “From three o’clock in the afternoon till an hour after sunset the place is crowded with boyards, boyardines, and the sons and daughters of the same, shopkeepers, peasants, gipsies, officers, and cadets, without any distinction of rank, but all dressed regardless of expense, and swaggering in thoroughly peacock pride. We have matter-of-fact people, practical people, go-ahead people, ingenious people, etc., but without exception this is the ‘dressiest’ people of Europe. To see the manner in which the young people fig themselves out here, one might imagine that millinery, hosiery, and tailors’ goods were a profitable investment of capital. When one has been awhile in the East one generally ceases to wonder at varieties of costume; but the _beau monde_ of Bucharest in holiday attire might well rouse the most nonchalant or phlegmatic into surprise and attention. Fashions of dress seldom remain long in one’s memory. The man who this year enters the Park with a terribly broad-brimmed hat does not remember for a moment that twelve months previously he would have been miserable had he worn one with a brim more than an eighth of an inch wide. It needs engravings to call up really vivid recollections of what one’s-self, as well as every one else, wore ten, twenty, or thirty years ago; and Bucharest recalls very vividly a certain class of engravings. Every one is familiar with those splendid works of art which represent his Majesty George III. reviewing the Middlesex Volunteers in Hyde Park, the Pump Room in Bath, Charing-cross at the period of the erection of Nelson’s Column, or any other remarkable scene as it appeared in the days of that illustrious individual, Mr. Brummell. Your readers well remember the broad-crowned Caroline hats, the short-waisted coats, the long-tailed surtouts, the ‘pumps’ and Hessian boots, in which fashionables strutted at that period. All this, and more, is to be seen here. Young men walk about in sky-blue cutaway coats with brass buttons and shockingly short skirts, trousers almost as