IN LADIES’ dress more allowance must be made for the caprices of fashion; it always has been their prescriptive right to exercise their ingenuity, and fancy, in adorning their persons; and, save that the head-dress is somewhat caricatured, the next illustration gives a very good idea of the style of dress adopted by ladies at the commencement of 1800, some phases of which we are familiar with, owing to their recent reproduction—such as the _décolletée_ dress, and clinging, and diaphonous skirt, as well as the long gloves. [Illustration: PARIS FASHIONS FOR WINTER DRESS—1800.] However, the eccentricities of English costume, at this period, were as nothing compared with their French sisters. The Countess of Brownlow,[48] speaking, as an eye-witness, says: “The Peace of 1802 brought, I suppose, many French to England; but I only remember one, the celebrated Madame Recamier, who created a sensation, partly by her beauty, but still more by her dress, which was vastly unlike the unsophisticated style, and _poke_ bonnets, of the English women. She appeared in Kensington Gardens, _à l’antique_, a muslin dress clinging to her form like the folds of the drapery on a statue; her hair in a plait at the back, and falling in small ringlets round her face, and greasy with _huile antique_; a large veil thrown over the head, completed her attire, that not unnaturally caused her to be followed and stared at.” [Illustration: FASHIONS, EARLY 1800.] The French Revolution and early Consulate were eminently classical, as regards ladies’ dress; and, as a matter of course, the mode was followed in England, but never to the extent that it was in France. No one can doubt the beauty of this style of dress; but it was one totally unfitted for out-door use, and even for evening dress. It was very slight, and then only fitted for the young and graceful, certainly not for the middle-aged and rotund. [Illustration: FASHIONABLE FURBELOES; OR, THE BACK FRONT OF A LADY OF FASHION, IN THE YEAR 1801.] [Illustration: LIGHT HEAD-DRESSES AND LONG PETTICOATS FOR THE YEAR 1802.] [Illustration: PREPARING FOR A BALL—1803.] There was a ladies’ magazine, which began in 1806, called _La belle Assemblée_; and a very good magazine it is. In it, of course, are numerous fashion plates; but I take it that they were then, much as now, intended to be looked at as indications of the fashion, more than the fashion itself. Certainly, in the contemporaneous prints, I have never met with any costume like them, and I much prefer for accuracy of detail, to go to the pictorial satirist, who, if he did somewhat exaggerate, did so on a given basis, an actual costume; and, moreover, threw some life and expression into his groups, which render them better worth looking at, than the meaningless lay-figures, which serve as pegs, on which to hang the clothes of the fashion-monger.