[Illustration: Figure 11.--COURTIER FOLLOWING THE EDICT of 1633. He has laid aside his lace collar and fine clothes. By Abraham Bosse, 1633. (_Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston._) {Le Courtisan suiuant L’Edict de l’annee 1633} {additional caption at end}] [Illustration: Figure 12.--LA GALERIE DU PALAIS. The fashionable crowd throngs the milliners’ counters in the Palais Royal. By Abraham Bosse, 1636. (_Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston._) {caption at end}] Indeed, this series would not be considered in connection with fashion plates were it not for a conversation in Ben Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_, first acted in 1600 by the Children of the Queen’s Chapel. Philautia addresses her friend Phantaste (Act 2, scene 1): Philautia: . . . What, have you changed your head-tire? Phantaste: Yes, faith, the other was near the common, it had no extraordinary grace; besides, I had worn it almost a day, in good troth. Philautia: I’ll be sworn, this is most excellent for the device, and rare; ’tis after the Italian print we looked on t’other night. This certainly suggests that one of the little eyases, perhaps even Nathaniel Field or Salathiel Pavy, was wearing a fantastic wig designed after one of the Krieger woodcuts. In the early 17th century there was nothing published in northern Europe that was closely related to the fashion trade. There are engravings of costume figures such as the _Sieben Edelleute verschiedener Nation_ by Willem Buytewech (Amsterdam, ca. 1614), which are charmingly drawn but, as to costume, idealized and exaggerated.[23] The same criticism applies to the later series by J. de St. Igny, especially in _Le Jardin de la Noblesse_, and to Jacques Callot’s _La Noblesse_,[24] which depict military and court dress with less caricature than most of this master’s work. Among the engravings of Abraham Bosse, there is a series (fig. 11) relating to the sumptuary law of 1633 by which Louis XIII, at the instigation of Cardinal Richelieu, tried to curb the extravagance and simplify the dress of the ladies and gentlemen of his court. This series is worth mentioning as a record of the dress at this period, but neither these engravings nor the better known “Galerie du Palais” (fig. 12) are, strictly speaking, fashion plates which provide information for dressmakers or wearers of clothes.[25] In England, the engravings were of a rather different style. Dutch prints of allegorical subjects were in vogue, and there are innumerable sets of prints of the seven Ages of mankind, the five senses, the four seasons, the continents, and the liberal arts, typified by real and imaginary figures in all styles of dress. Jean Barrà’s figure “Seeing” (fig. 13), with her looking glass and perspective glass, accompanied by the farsighted eagle, is illustrated here mainly because of its explanatory quatrain mentioning fashions.[26]