When to this description is added the fact that the hoop petticoat and another article of dress monopolised the whalebone, it will be seen how much had to be got over before an Umbrella could be carried out by the citizens of London, as a walking-staff, with satisfactory assurance of protection in case of a shower. The earliest English Umbrellas, we must also remember, were made of oiled silk, very clumsy and difficult to open when wet; the stick and furniture were heavy and inconvenient, and the article very expensive. At the end of the century allusions to the Umbrella are not infrequent. Cowper, in his "Task" (1780), twice mentions it, but seems to mean a Parasol:-- "We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree." --B. i. And again:-- "Expect her soon, with footboy at her heels, No longer blushing for her awkward load, Her train and her umbrella all her care." --B. iv, The Rev. G. C. Renouard, writing in 1850 to Notes and Queries, says:-- "In the hall of my father's house, at Stamford, in Lincolnshire, there was, when I was a child, the wreck of a large green silk umbrella, apparently of Chinese manufacture, brought by my father from Scotland, somewhere between 1770 and 1780, and, as I have often heard, the first umbrella seen at Stamford. I well remember, also, an amusing description given by the late Mr. Warry, so many years consul at Smyrna, of the astonishment and envy of his mother's neighbours, at Sawbridgeworth, in Hants, where his father had a country house, when he ran home and came back with an umbrella, which he had just brought from Leghorn, to shelter them from a pelting shower which detained them in the church porch, after the service, on one summer Sunday. From Mr. Warry's age at the time he mentioned this, and other circumstances in his history, I conjecture that it occurred not later than 1775 or 1776. As Sawbridgeworth is so near London, it is evident that even then umbrellas were at that time almost unknown." Since this date, however, the Umbrella has come into general use, and in consequence numerous improvements have been effected in it. The transition to the present portable form is due, partly to the substitution of silk and gingham for the heavy and troublesome oiled silk, which admitted of the ribs and frames being made much lighter, and also to the many ingenious mechanical improvements in the framework, chiefly by French and English manufacturers, many of which were patented, and to which we purpose presently to allude. CHAPTER IV. THE STORY OF THE PARACHUTE. In giving an account of the Umbrella, it would not be right to omit mentioning another, and far from legitimate use in which it has been employed by notoriety-hunting _artistes_--we allude to the Parachute; and a short narration of its origin and progress may not be uninteresting to our readers.