Douce quotes some curious particulars of this fashion, in “Raymond’s Voyage through Italy,” 1648, and the following curious account of the chopine occurs: “This place [Venice] is much frequented by the walking may-poles: I mean the women. They wear their coats half too long for their bodies, being mounted on their _chippeens_ (which are as high as a man’s leg); they walke betweene two handmaids, majestically deliberating of every step they take.” Howel also says of the Venetian women: “They are low and of small stature for the most part, which makes them to raise their bodies upon high shoes, called _chapins_, which gave me occasion to say that the Venetian ladies were made of three things, one part of them was wood, meaning their chapins, another part was their apparel, and the third part was a woman. The senate hath often endeavored to take away the wearing of those high shoes, but all women are so passionately delighted with this kind of state, that no law can wean them from it.” Douce adds, that “some have supposed that the jealousy of Italian husbands gave rise to the invention of the chopine;” and quotes a story from a French author, to show their dislike to an alteration; he also says, that “the first ladies who rejected the use of the chopine, were the daughters of the doge Dominico Contareno, about the year 1670.” The chopine, or some kind of high shoe, was occasionally used in England. Bulwer, in his “Artificial Changeling,” p. 550, complains of this fashion as a monstrous affectation, and says that his countrywomen therein imitated the Venetian and Persian ladies. In “Sandy’s Travels,” 1615, there is a figure of a Turkish lady with chopines, and it is not improbable that the Venetians might have borrowed them from the Greek islands in the Archipelago. We know that something similar was in use among the ancient Greeks. Xenophon, in Œconomics, mentions the wife of Ischomachus as wearing high shoes, for increasing her stature. They are still worn by the women in many parts of Turkey, but more particularly at Aleppo. Douce’s notice of their antiquity, is curiously corroborated by the discovery in the tombs of ancient Egypt of such shoes. They are formed of a stout sole of wood, to which is affixed four round props, raising the wearer a foot in height; specimens were among the collections of Mr. Salt, the British consul in Egypt, from which some of the choicest Egyptian antiquities in the national collection were obtained. The other remark of Douce’s, that they were probably derived from the Greek islands of the Archipelago, is confirmed by the fact that high-soled boots and shoes were much coveted by the ladies there, to raise their stature, and were worn when chopines had long been disused; thus the high-soled boots delineated in plate IV., fig. 13, are found upon the feet of “a young lady of Argentiera,” one of these islands, in a print dated 1700; and, in another of the same date, giving the costume of a lady of the