Scarron, in his /Poésies Diverses/, has left us in four verses a pretty picture of manners for any one who could morally develop it. The poor cripple Scarron certainly had no need of a Muff in his arm-chair!-- My wife then leaves at once, though she All perils should divide with me; She takes her Muff and goes To see some one she knows. . . . But let us leave the age of big wigs and Fontange head-dresses, and penetrate into the age of powder and patches, into the age of Voltaire, who, /à propos/ of one of his characters in /Micromégas/, wrote: "Imagine a very small Muff-dog following a captain of the Guards of the King of Prussia." An engraving of the /Encyclopédie/ presents us in the nick of time with a faithful reproduction of a shop of a furrier of the last century. Day penetrates through a large glass bow window; all round, on shelves, are ranged Muffs and different furs; two pleasing shopwomen offer their customers enormous Muffs of miniver, and a shop-boy beats with a rod one of those furred mantles which were sent "to be kept" during the summer, to preserve them from the mites. This engraving, a precious document which may be attributed to Cochin, recalls two charming little stories of Restif de la Bretonne in his /Contemporaines du Commun/: one entitled /La Jolie Fourreuse/, the other /La Jolie Pelletière/. Professions passed out of sight! "Furs"--MM. de Goncourt wrote in a note of much study to their book /La Femme au XVIII^e Siècle/--"were a great luxury of Parisian ladies, at the time when the fashion was to arrive at the opera wrapt in the most superb and rarest, and to take them off little by little with coquettish art." The reputation of the sable, the ermine, the miniver, the lynx, the otter, is indicated in the /Étrennes Fourrées dédiées aux jolies Frileuses/, Geneva, 1770. Muffs have quite a history, from those on which the furrier brought discredit, in causing one to be worn by the hangman on the execution day--these were probably Muffs /à la Jésuite/, muffs which were not of fur, and against which a pleasantry at the commencement of the century, /A petition presented to the Pope by the master furriers/, solicits excommunication--up to those of Angora goats' hair, immense Muffs which reached to the ground, and to the little Muffs at the end of the century, baptized /little barrels/, as the Palatine was called /cat/. The fashion of sledges, then very widely spread, added to the fashion of furs. An etching of Caylus, after a drawing of Coypel, about the middle of the century, shows us in a sledge set on dolphins--one of those sledges which cost ten thousand crowns--a pretty woman dressed entirely in fur, her head-dress a small bonnet of fur with an egret, carried along in a sledge, which is driven by a coachman dressed like a Muscovite, and standing at the back. /À propos/ of furs, the /Palatine/ owes its fortune and its name to the