used
great fear, tumult, and confusion among the spectators, and throughout
the hall, every one fearing hurt, as if the devil had been present,
and grown angry to have his workmanship shewed by such as were not his
own scholars.'[4]

The small figures, which appeared to have created the chief
consternation, were, we are inclined to believe, very innocent things.
There was, it is true, a belief that an individual could be injured or
slain by operations on his likeness. There was, however, another
purpose connected with Mrs Turner's pursuits to which small jointed
images, like artists' lay figures, were used. This was to exhibit the
effect of any new fashion, or peculiar style of dress. In this manner
small figures, about the size of dolls, were long used in Paris. We
have seen people expressing their surprise at pictures of full-grown
Frenchwomen examining dolls, but in reality they were not more
triflingly occupied than those who now contemplate the latest fashions
in their favourite feminine periodical. Mrs Turner was very likely to
have occasion for such figures, for she was, with her other pursuits,
a sort of dressmaker, or _modiste_; in fact, she seems to have been a
ready minister to every kind of human vanity and folly, as well as to
a good deal of human wickedness. In the department of dress, she had a
name in her own sex and age as illustrious as that of Brummel among
dandies in the beginning of this century. As he was the inventor of
the starched cravat, she was his precursor in the invention of the
starched ruff, or, as it is generally said, of the yellow starch.

The best account we have of the starched ruff is by a man who wrote to
abuse it. An individual named Stubbes published an _Anatomy of
Abuses_. Having become extremely rare, a small impression of it was
lately reprinted, as a curious picture of the times. Stubbes dealt
trenchantly with everything that savoured of pride and ostentation in
dress; and he was peculiarly severe on Mrs Turner's invention, which
made the ruff stand against bad weather. He describes the ruffs as
having been made 'of cambric Holland lawn; or else of some other the
finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a
yard deep; yea, some more--very few less.' He describes with much glee
the elementary calamities to which, before the invention of the
starch, they were liable. 'If AEolus with his blasts, or Neptune with
his storms, chance to hit upon the crazy