The most celebrated and the most delicious picture in which a Muff figures is assuredly that adorable painting known by the name of /The Young Girl with the Muff/, by Joshua Reynolds, which formed part of the beautiful collection of the Marquis of Hertford. Nothing is more delicate than this painting. That young English-woman seems rather to walk through the picture than remain fixed in it, so great, one might say, was the quickness with which the painter has caught that image in its passage with its movement of walking--the body is inclined a little forward, the head on one side; the woman's bust, which stops at the Muff, is so fresh in its composition, so fine in its tonality, so radiant in its originality of design, that it would be enough almost by itself to establish the immortal reputation of Reynolds, who has put into his work a very quintessence of femininity, as an ideal of the most exquisite English loveliness, and also as a type, delicate and never to be forgotten, of a chilly beauty. Nor must we forget the /Portrait of Mrs. Siddons/, painted by Gainsborough, in the charm of her twenty-ninth year, in 1784. This picture, which was exhibited at Manchester in 1857, is now in the /National Gallery/. The charming lady, dressed in a fresh striped blue and white robe, with a fawn-coloured shawl half falling from her shoulders, has on her head a large black felt hat, ornamented with feathers--one of those hats which have done more for the vulgarisation of the glory of Gainsborough than all his studies and portraits. Mrs. Siddons is seated, holding on her lap with her left hand a comfortable Muff of fox or Siberian wolf, of which she appears to caress the fur with her right hand, as if to show off the beauty and whiteness of her spindle-shaped fingers. The mistress of the works of a master who had, it is only right to say, the most ravishing face in the world to portray. But, without needing to have further recourse to the English school, have we not that luminous portrait of Madame Vigée Lebrun, in which the Muff, raised almost level with the head, spreads the shine of its hair of tawny gold like the head of a courtezan of Venice? That astonishing painting of the end of the eighteenth century appeared in its dazzling splendour, in the midst of the square saloon of the Museum of the Louvre, killing, by mere force of freshness and light, the magistral bituminous pictures of the beginning of the century, which are its near neighbours. Under Louis XVI. the frenzy of the toilette reached its most acute crisis: fashions succeeded one another in a few years with so much rapidity that we can scarcely follow them; people sought to outstrip in everything rather than to refine, and the Muffs, carried by men and women alike, became enormous and exaggerated. Hurtaut, in his /Dictionnaire de la Ville de Paris/, article /Modes/, makes this strange remark in the year 1784, "A lady has been seen at the opera with a /Muff of momentaneous agitation/."