of saucy “curtsies,”—so droll, so rapid, so “audacious,” and so full of hearty, innocent, uncontrollable fun,—that duchess, princess, old lady, and the few spectators of the scene, broke into as much laughter as _bienséance_ would permit; and some of them, no doubt, “exclaimed _mentally_,” as well-bred people do in novels, that there was a royal English girl, who had most unquestionably a heart and a will of her own,—and may God bless both! I have noticed above how queens of foreign birth introduced to our ancestresses fashions of which their young imaginations had never dreamed. The origin of all fashion then, as now, was in France; and thitherward we now will take our way. “LA MODE” IN HER BIRTH-PLACE. Chacun à sa mode, et les ânes à l’ancienne.—MODISH PROVERB. The Honourable James Howard, in the year 1764, wrote a sprightly comedy, entitled ‘The English Monsieur.’ The hero is an individual who sees nothing English that is not execrable. An English meal is poison, and an English coat degradation. He once challenged a tasteless individual who had praised an English dinner; and, says the _English Monsieur_, “I ran him through his mistaken palate, which made me think the hand of justice guided my sword.” He can tell whether English or French ladies have passed along the moist road before him, by the impressions that they leave. “I have often,” he remarks, “in France, observed in gardens, when the company used to walk after a small shower of rain, the impression of the French ladies’ feet. I have seen such _bonne mine_ in their footsteps, that the King of France’s _maître de danse_ could not have found fault with any one tread amongst them all. In this walk,” he adds, “I find the toes of English ladies ready to tread upon one another.” Subsequently our “English Monsieur” quarrels with a friend, because he had found fault with “a pair of French tops” worn by the Philogallist, and which were so noisy when the wearer moved in them, that the other’s mistress could not hear a word of the love made to her. The wearer justifies the noise as a fashionable French noise; “for look you, Sir, a French noise is agreeable to the air, and therefore not unagreeable, and therefore not prejudicial to the hearing; that is to say, to a person who has seen the world.” The slave of Gallomania even finds comfort, when his own mistress rejects him, in the thought that “’twas a denial with a French tone of voice, so that ’twas agreeable!” and when she bids him a final adieu, he remarks to a friend, “Do you see, Sir, how she leaves us? she walks away with a French step.” Such was the early allegiance rendered even in this country to the authority of France in the matters of “Mode,” of that ever-variable queen, of whom a French writer himself has despairingly said, that she is the despot of ladies and fops; “La mode est le tyran des femmes et des fats.”