Fashion is the everlasting Fairy; whether she take the Sunshade as a rod at the end of her gloved hand, or the Muff as a surprise-box or a cornucopia, she is never short of inventions, of prodigies, of follies, and of ruins; she seems to avenge herself on the moderns because the ancients gave her not divine honours, nor placed her upon the summit of their Olympus. Let, then, the head of this new and great goddess be adorned with a weathercock helmet, of which Love will furnish the magnetic arrow, and let a statue be raised to that great first French citizeness, who from Paris governs the world with so formidable a despotism, against whom none ever dreams of raising a revolt. For us, who, /à propos/ of the Sunshade, the Glove, and the Muff, have just cast a glance upon the museum of this female ruler, we are in a state of dread from the inconceivable variety of objects which were for an hour a woman's pleasure, and, if we have not conducted our readers before all the glass cases of this national museum, great as the universe, or "the vastest in the world," as all large milliners' shops entitle themselves, it is because around the ornaments of women the fickle Loves will always dance their frenzied round, which only a madman can ever hope and wish to stop. It has been said that Fashion is woman's only literature; if, however, our elegant ladies were condemned to study the special archæology of this literature, very soon--as in love--would they desert History for Romance. APPENDIX We see sometimes appearing certain light little works connected either with literary history or ancient poetry, or manners and customs, which would be nothing but pretty and curious pamphlets, if the Appendix which follows them were not swelled out of all proportion with proofs and illustrations, annotated notes, documents with sidenotes, bibliographic bibliography, considerations and commentaries of all sorts, which put the reader to the torture. By this proceeding of an exaggerated literary conscience, an opuscule of thirty pages arrives sometimes at three hundred: it is in some sense a case of erudite exaltation, sometimes also a vain-glory of the investigator, who has a mind to climb up the pyramid of books he has examined, proudly there to set up his silhouette, as we plant a flag on a building as soon as it is complete. As an epilogue to another volume of this series, /The Fan/, we published a sketch of documentary bibliography to indicate the principal works which we had searched for the little materials necessary for that monograph. You will find there six or eight pages of titles placed without order, and ending with this phrase of a man out of breath, and expressing extreme fatigue--/et cœtera/.