protection it requires...."--(_Times, Sept. 20, 1799._) Brobdignag. [Illustration: "A Jean Debry" (Mr. Skeffington.)] [Illustration: French Tailor fitting John Bull with a "Jean de Bry"] WOMEN'S DRESS. The earliest Lady's fashion book I can find in the British Museum, is "The Lady's Monthly Museum," &c. "By a Society of Ladies,"--and it was published in 1799--or just the last year of which this book takes cognizance. But, luckily, the satirical prints supply the want, in a great measure, although they are somewhat exaggerated. From them we are able to see pictorially what might be hard to describe, and may be perfectly certain that they represent "the very last thing out" at their date of Publication. If, then, we have very little written about female attire, in 1788, and the next year, or two, we must be content with viewing the _veræ effigies_ of the belles of that time. Brighton, of course, was the fashionable watering-place, for there were the life and gaiety of the young Court, in contradistinction to the humdrum existence led by the King, Queen, and younger branches of the Royal Family, at Weymouth. So it will be interesting to know their habits at this famous sea-side resort. The _Morning Post_, 18th September 1788, has the following:-- "The Ladies have no particular dress for the morning, but _huddle_ away to the bathing place, in close caps, and _gipsey bonnets_, so that they look like a set of wandering _fortune-tellers_, who have just had the opportunity of pillaging the contents of a _frippery warehouse_, with which they had bedecked themselves in haste. "It is to be remarked that the ladies do not atone for the negligence of the morning, by neatness, and elegance, during the rest of the day, but _shuffle on something_ by dinner time, covering themselves with an enormous _nondescript_ bonnet, which, to the confusion of all order, they afterwards think a proper garb for the Assembly." In doors, the dresses were not so _outré_, as we see by the two illustrations taken from "The School for Scandal," 1st August 1788. That ladies copied the eccentricities of male attire, and made them their own, we have proof in this cutting from the _Morning Post_, 15th January 1789:-- "Among other fashions lately introduced from Paris is the brace of gold watch chains now sported by our fashionable females. Some economical husbands may wish their wives were less imitative." The portrait of the Duchess of York (the Princess Frederique, Charlotte, Ulrique, Catherine, of Prussia, married to the Duke, November 1791), shews us the indoor dress of a lady of rank in 1792. She had a remarkably small foot, and many were the delineations of her shoes--actual size, &c. Of all curious freaks of fashion the following is the most incomprehensible, yet it doubtless obtained:--