LARGE BONNETS.
(For the Mirror.)
The immense large bonnets which decorate the ladies of the present day are truly "over the borders," and seem to keep pace with the "march of intellect." A garden seems to bloom on their exterior, and roses and lilies vie with each other above and below, for underneath the living roses flourish on the cheeks of the fair. Perhaps in a few years small bonnets will usurp the day, for
"Extremes produce extremes, extremes avoid,
Extremes without extremes are not enjoyed."
Some years ago, when straw bonnets were all the rage, the following pithy lines were composed by M. P. Andrewes, Esq.:—
"Some ladies' heads appear like stubble fields;
Who now of threaten'd famine dare complain,
When every female forehead teems with grain?
See how the wheat-sheaves nod amid the plumes!
Our barns are now transferr'd to drawing-rooms,
And husbands who indulge in active lives,
To fill their granaries may thrash their wives."
P.T.W.
Our facetious correspondent does not notice the golden oats; but doubtless he recollects the anecdote of the horse mistaking a lady's hat with a tuft of oats for a moving manger stocked with his natural provender.—ED.
Footnote 1:[(return)]
The sum of 144l. 5s. was expended in the rebuilding.
Footnote 2:[(return)]
By an odd mode of expression in the MS., it should seem as if this tower itself, or at least some building adjoining it, was formerly made use of as a royal residence, for the words are, from hence went a fair embattled wall, guarded for the most part with the mill-stream underneath, till it came in the high tower, going under St. George's College, and the king's house employed formerly as a campanile belonging to that church.
Footnote 3:[(return)]
Grose fell into an error on this point, in his 3rd volume of Antiquitica, for in his copy of Aga's plan, he placed a large keep tower just at the foot of an artificial mount—an anomaly in fortification. The same punster who described fortification as two twenty fications, would call this a Grose blunder.
Footnote 4:[(return)]
When Robert D'Oiley, in the reign of Henry V. built the abbey at Osney, for monks and regulars, and gave them the revenues, &c. of the church of St. George, in the Castle, it is said in the Osney chronicle, that there "Robert Pulen began to read at Oxford the Holy Scriptures, which had fallen into neglect in England. And after both the church of England and that of France had profited greatly by his doctrine, he was called away by Pope Lucius II., who made him chancellor of the holy Roman church." This short effort, to which the Pope's preferment put a stop, seems to have been the true origin of the DIVINITY LECTURE, and of the DIVINITY SCHOOLS at Oxford; and of the studies of the SORBONNE at Paris.
Footnote 5:[(return)]
For an interesting account of the founding and a view of this abbey, see the MIRROR for Sept. 30, 1826.
Footnote 6:[(return)]
Eastmead's "Historia Rievallensis."
Footnote 7:[(return)]
Of Skelton Castle, author of "Crazy Tales," and of the "Continuation of Sterne's Sentimental Journey."
Footnote 8:[(return)]
Sir James Hall of Douglass, Bart., the father of Captain Basil Hall, R.N., and, till lately, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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