If by a game of metempsychosis, you were enabled to return to existence two hundred years hence, what unheard of changes would you not see in the dress of individuals. Transport in anticipation your shade to a point commanding one of the public promenades of the capital; suppose yourself, for instance, on the top of the Vendôme Column, on a fine summer’s evening; you would, perhaps, perceive the dandies of the time strutting in frocks, whose leg of mutton sleeves are as voluminous as those of our sylphides at this day. Their hats, instead of being of beaver or of fur, have a similar shape to that which our ladies adopted in 1839. For the young folks a notched veil would be the prescribed mode; the men, of a certain age, would embellish their hats with a superb scarlet plume. As to the women, who will now dare to affirm that they will not then cover their heads with perukes à la Louis XIV. topped off with three-cocked hats, and that from their chin there will not descend a band à la procureur du roi? Extend your Pythagorean glance farther into the ages, and you will, perhaps, discover another part of mankind adding to their dress an enormous pair of wings! We may doubt that the gnomes, the sciences, will never render the attempt to make use of them more effectual than that of the son of Dædalus in old times; but in return, posterity may fly by another process, in case the æronauts can discover the secret of steering themselves in mid-air. Should this expectation be realised, we may then hear one of your future grand-nieces (who will be the belles of the noble Faubourg) say to her domestic on rising from her breakfast, “Ganymede! my balloon, with its boat; I wish to go dine to-day with my cousin, at Florence.”
| [2] | It is generally believed that the word calico is derived from Calicut, a city on the coast of Malabar in Hindostan, whence the first patterns of this stuff came to Europe. |
| [3] | Dyers now know how to produce a very durable red by dipping their stuffs in a solution of acetate of alum, before subjecting them to the action of the madder. It would be desirable that they should begin to derive some advantage, on a large scale, of a new substance, lately discovered by Mr. Robiquet, which possesses the property of producing a red amaranth or pansy, very agreeable. Chemists call this substance orsine. |
| [4] | This will be news to the people “in South Carolina, as well as in the state of Virginia.” Translator. |
Philadelphia, May, 1841.
TO LORD BYRON.
FROM THE FRENCH OF LAMARTINE.
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