streets, and they continued to be worn and grew to monstrous dimensions after their usefulness had very much decreased. It became the rule that the greater the lady was, the higher her clogs must be, till they turned into something like stilts, and she could no longer walk except leaning on the shoulders of two servants. In China, the Chinese men, as distinguished from the Tartars, encourage the barbarous breaking of girls’ feet, because it makes it impossible for them to gad about the town when they are older, and still less to run away. The Venetian noblemen approved of clogs for the same reason. M. Yriarte tells how a foreign ambassador, who was once talking with the Doge and his counsellors in 1623, observed that little shoes would be far more convenient than the huge clogs in fashion. One of the counsellors shook his head in grave disapproval as he answered: ‘Far too convenient, indeed! Far too much so.’ The civic museum in Venice contains two pairs of clogs, one of which is twenty inches in height, the other seventeen. Some were highly ornamented, and the Provveditori alle Pompe made sumptuary regulations against adorning them with over-rich embroidery or with fine pearls. At the same time, shoemakers were warned that they would be liable to a fine of twenty-five lire for any pair of clogs not of proper dimensions and becoming simplicity. Yet they continued to be worn of extravagant size and excessively ornamented till the end of the seventeenth century, when they suddenly sank to nothing, so that a clever woman of the time complained that the Venetian ladies were beginning to wear shoes no thicker than a footman’s. They were especially affected by the nobles, for the burgher class wore them of much more moderate size. Altogether the life of the burghers’ wives was far more enjoyable; they occupied themselves with music and painting; they held gatherings at which men and women really exchanged ideas, and ‘academies’ at which women with a turn for poetry or science could compare themselves with the most gifted men of Venice. The most alive of the noble women of the sixteenth century, the one of whom we have the most vivid impression, was assuredly Bianca Cappello, who was a monster of iniquity. The others, who had not her opportunities for great crime, all seem like lay figures, or common odalisques, who lived a sensuous existence that was never disturbed by an idea. But the burgher women amused themselves, and thought, and wrote, and sometimes even allowed themselves a little sentiment. As for the women of the people, we know nothing about them, as there are no documents regarding them, but it seems probable that they were, on the whole, both happy and honest.