"A company has lately formed an establishment worthy of the town of Sybaris. It has obtained an exclusive privilege to have Parasols, and to furnish them to such as fear being incommoded by the sun during the crossing of the Pont-Neuf. There are to be offices at each extremity of the bridge, where the voluptuous dandies who are unwilling to spoil their complexion, can obtain this useful machine; they will return it at the office on the other side, so alternately, at the price of two farthings for each person. This project has already been put in execution. It is announced that if this invention succeeds, there is authority to establish like offices in other places in Paris, where skulls might be affected, such as the Place Louis XV., &c. It is probable that these profound speculators will obtain the exclusive privilege of Umbrellas." Did this enterprise succeed? We cannot tell. All that is certain is, that it was tried many times in our own epoch by innovators, who had no idea that even the letting out of Parasols was not absolutely new under the sun. * * * * * A great progress was realised in the eighteenth century in the manufacture of Sunshades for ladies. The small ordinary Parasols became exceedingly light, and charmingly decorated. In a picture of Bonaventure Delord, in the Louvre, we find the exact type of these coquettish Sunshades of the last century. One, which is held by a laughing beauty in the midst of a picnic, is mounted on a long stem, and the top, made of yellow buckskin, appears to have four sides; a cap of turned copper, and of a very pretty shape, profiles its tiny Chinese gable on the grass. So, too, may be seen in the collection of Madame la Baronne Gustave de Rothschild, a very curious Sunshade which belonged to Madame de Pompadour. It is of blue silk superbly decorated with wonderful Chinese miniatures in mica, and ornaments in paper very finely cut and affixed to the background. Fortified probably with such a Sunshade as this, the pretty favourite, at the time of the rage for pastorals, which followed the appearance of Bouffier's story of /Aline/, betook herself to the shady walks of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, with her female friends, to see the white sheep milked, and to steep the carnation of her lips in the warm milk, of which the young Abbé De Bernis--who gathered so willingly madrigals and bouquets for Chloris--compared the whiteness to that of her peerless bosom.