And, fortunately, what he despaired of accomplishing lies beyond the limits of our present subject. But the time spent at the toilet was not all dedicated to dress and the tire-woman. Addison’s skilful pen will supply an apt illustration; “Sempronia is at present the most professed admirer of the French nation; but is so modest as to admit her visitants no farther than her toilet. It is a very odd sight that beautiful creature makes when she is talking politics, with her tresses flowing about her shoulders, and examining that face in the glass, which does such execution upon the standers-by. How prettily does she divide her discourse between her woman and her visitants! What sprightly transitions does she make from an opera or a sermon to an ivory comb or a pin-cushion! How have I been pleased to see her interrupted in an account of her travels by a message to her footman, and holding her tongue in the midst of a moral reflection by applying the tip of it to a patch!” “Vanessa held Montaigne and read, Whilst Mrs. Susan combed her head,” The Duchess of Sunderland, daughter of the celebrated Duchess of Marlborough, and like her mother, says Horace Walpole, conspicuous for her long and beautiful hair; was a great politician, and used, when combing it, to receive the visits of those whose vote and interest she sought to influence. While Queen Anne dressed, prayers used to be read in an outer room, and once ordering the door to be shut while she shifted, the chaplain stopped. The queen sent to ask why he did not proceed. He replied, “He would not whistle the word of God through the key-hole.” The author of the “Reminiscences” adds, that Queen Caroline was wont to dispatch her toilet and hear prayers in the same fashion. The Duchess of Marlborough on one occasion was somewhat prodigal of her fine fair hair, of which she had the greatest abundance; for being engaged at her toilet, in a fit of anger towards the Duke, she cut off those commanding tresses and flung them in his face. The beauties of those days made politics, the card table, and the toilet, their chief study, and “Thought the life of ev’ry lady Should be one continued play-day-- Balls, and masquerades, and shows, Visits, plays, and powdered beaus.” The wits and poets of that brilliant era, have hit off the manners of the times, and all the paraphernalia of patches, fans, hoops, and head-dresses, by a few touches of the pen, with such airy grace and lightness in the true spirit of comic revelry, and with keenest irony, that more modern efforts in the same style appear, by comparison, coarse and clumsy. In our own day one would think the artists all copied from the same model, “Small waist, wide flounces, and a face divine, Wretchedly foolish, and extremely fine.”