early Victorian era. It was a dress that only a few could wear with distinction; on the rest it wrinkled and puffed in inevitable ugliness. A Roger de Beauvoir could look immaculately moulded, but one has only to glance at the caricatures of Traviés, Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni to see how unequivocally hideous were the clothes of an average man. To be out at elbows in this exacting fashion was indeed to be a sorry sight, and one can well imagine poor Lucien de Rubempré to have been in his provincial attire fair game for the sneers of Rastignac and de Marsay. Still, even the Bohemian had a new suit at times, and it lights the memory of Arsène Houssaye, Camille Rogier, Murger, Champfleury, and the rest to recall that it was not for comfortable lounge suits and flannels that they got into debt, but for correct suits of "tails," flowery waistcoats, top-hats, and patent leather boots. It gives a quaint touch of decorum to the picture of their wildest excesses. Women entered Bohemia as guests rather than as inhabitants, and to the fair visitors conformity to fashion was anything but a trifle. To deck themselves fittingly was their constant amusement, and one in which they took good care that their swains should be sharers. The female dress of the time is well known to us from early pictures of Queen Victoria and the paintings of Winterhalter; there are few, too, who at one time or another have not seen some of Gavarni's beautiful fashion plates. The Empire style had entirely disappeared, and the accent was in 1830 laid chiefly on the waist. The shoulders were sloping and wide, the sleeves so voluminous that by 1836 they were like miniature balloons, the skirt very wide and full, ending above the ankles. The waist and head were made to seem very small in proportion, so that two loaves placed one on top of the other would have made a very good caricature of a woman's figure at any time during the golden age of Bohemia. The hair was elaborately done to frame a pretty face daintily under a large poke-bonnet. It was pre-eminently the day of "fragile" women: nothing in their costume seemed made for hard wear. Cydalise or Victorine, as she swung in the hammock among the gallants of the Impasse du Doyenné, would have kicked a little cross-laced foot out from ethereal folds of flowered muslin, and gathered a gauzy scarf enticingly round bare shoulders. Fashions were indeed expensive for a fond lover's pocket, but at least he was never at a loss what to buy for his mistress, so many were the little accessories to the Graces' toilet. He was never wrong, for instance, in offering a piece of gay ribbon, for there were bows everywhere, on the bosom, on the sleeves, and, with long dazzling streamers, round the waist. There was no end to their variety and combination of colours, brilliant and pale; even the crudest Scottish tartans were not considered amiss, as a certain dress in the London Museum will show the incredulous. If ribbon was too paltry, a man in a