George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote with a vivid pen; one of his own followers said with severity, “He paints high.” Some of his denunciations of the dress of his day afford a very good notion of the peculiarities of contemporary costume; though he may be read with this caution in mind. He writes deploringly of women’s sleeves (in the year 1654); it will be noted that he refers to double cuffs:— “The women having their cuffs double under and above, like a butcher with his white sleeves, their ribands tied about their hands, and three or four gold laces about their clothes.” Ninon de l’Enclos. Ninon de l’Enclos. There were three generations of English heralds named Holme, all genealogists, and all artists; they have added much to our knowledge of old English dress. Randle Holme, the Chester herald, lived in the reign of Charles II, and increased a collection of manuscript begun by his grandfather and now forming part of the Harleian Collection in the British Museum. He wrote also the _Academy of Armoury_, published in 1688, and made a vast number of drawings for it, as well as for his other works. His note-books of drawings are preserved. In one of them he gives drawings of the sleeve which is found on every seventeenth-century portrait of American women which I have ever seen. He calls this a virago-sleeve. It was worn in Queen Elizabeth’s day, but was a French fashion. It is gathered very full in the shoulder and again at the wrist, or at the forearm. At intervals between, it is drawn in by gathering-strings of narrow ribbons, or ferret, which are tied in a pretty knot or rose on the upper part of the sleeve. One from a French portrait is given here. Madam Ninon de l’Enclos also wears one. This gathering may be at the elbow, forming thus two puffs, or there may be several such drawing-strings. I have seen a virago-sleeve with five puffs. It is a fine decorative sleeve, not always shapely, perhaps, but affording in the pretty knots of ribbon some relief to the severity of the rest of the dress. Stubbes wrote, “Some have sleeves cut up the arm, drawn out with sundry colours, pointed with silk ribbands, and very gallantly tied with love knotts.” It was at first a convention of fashion, and it lingered long in some modification, that wherever there was a slash there was a knot of ribbon or a bunch of tags or aglets. This in its origin was really that the slash might be tied together. Ribbon knots were much worn; the early days of the great court of Louis XIV saw an infinite use of ribbons for men and women. When, in the closing years of the century, rows of these knots were placed on either side of the stiff busk with bars of ribbon forming a stomacher, they were called _echelles_, ladders. _The Ladies’ Dictionary_ (1694) says they were “much in request.”