The women are no less curiously apparelled.--The drawings of Della Bella and Romain de Hooge may serve to indicate the general character of their attire; dresses of heavy, undulating stuffs, with broad folds which change color like the breasts of pigeons, and display all the varying hues of the iris, ample sleeves from which other sleeves issue, ruffs of open-slashed lace that rise higher than the heads for which they serve as frames, corsages covered with bows and embroidery, brooches,--strange trinkets, tufts of heron's feathers, necklaces of huge pearls, peacock's tail fans with mirrors in the centre, little slippers and pattens, wreaths of artificial flowers, spangles, striped gauze, paint, patches and everything that can add zest and piquancy to a stage costume. It is a style that is not precisely English or German or French or Turkish or Spanish or Tartar, although it partakes a little of them all and has taken from each country, its most graceful and characteristic features.--Actors thus arrayed can say whatever they choose without offending one's ideas of probability. The fancy can run in all directions, style uncoil its variegated rings at its pleasure, like a snake warming itself in the sun; the most exotic conceits open fearlessly their strangely-shaped calyxes and spread their perfume of amber and musk around.--There is nothing to offer any obstacle, either places or names or costumes. How fascinating and entertaining what they say! Fine actors that they are, they do not strut about, like our howlers of melodrama, twisting their mouths and forcing the eyes out of their heads to deliver their tirades with effect;--at all events they haven't the appearance of workmen at a task, of oxen harnessed to the plot and in a hurry to have done with it; they are not plastered with chalk and rouge half an inch thick; they don't wear tin daggers and keep in reserve under their waistcoats a pig's bladder filled with chicken's blood; they don't drag the same oil-spotted rag about through whole acts.