[23] Roman and Greek ladies employed parasols to shade their faces from the sun, and to keep off showers. See s. v. Umbraculum in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.
[24] A good deal of information relative to umbrellas may be got out of Sangster (W.). “Umbrellas and their History.” London: Cassell & Co., Ltd.
[25] The first Englishman who carried an umbrella was Jonas Hanway, who died in 1786, but it was known in England earlier. Beaumont and Fletcher allude to it in “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife”:
“Now are you glad, now is your mind at ease;
Now you have got a shadow, an umbrella,
To keep the scorching world’s opinion
From your fair credit.”
And Ben Jonson, in “The Devil is an Ass”:
“And there she lay, flat spread as an umbrella.”
Kersey in his Dictionary, 1708, describes an umbrella as a “screen commonly used by women to keep off rain.”