e virgins are in the simple attire of the best days
of Greece: but here, or in any of the monuments of that foster-country
of art, and in all the series of Roman sculpture and coins, he will find
no head-dress for a female beyond that of the veil. The great artists
and the great conquerors of the world never tolerated any thing beyond
this flowing drapery of the veil, as the covering for their wives' or
daughters' heads. They were satisfied with the beautiful contrast given
by the curving lines of its graceful folds; they admired its simplicity;
and they saw the perfect suitableness of its nature to its purpose. The
veil could be hastily drawn over the head, so as to conceal every
feature, and protect it from the gaze of man or the roughness of the
seasons--and it could as easily be withdrawn partially to allow of "a
sidelong glance of love," or wholly to give "a gaze of welcome," to a
relation and a friend. Happy men those old Greeks and Romans! they had
no bills for milliners--whatever their jewellers' accounts might have
come to! When they travelled, their slaves were not pestered with
bonnet-boxes and similar abominations--a clean yard or two of
Phoenician gauze, or Asian linen, set up Mrs Secretary Pericles, or
Mrs General Caesar, with a braw new veil. There was little caprice of
fashion--the veil would always fall into something like the same or at
least similar folds; and we do believe that, for a thousand years or
more, the type of the _mode_ remained fixed. Whether the ancient
Asiatics made their women wear precisely the same mask-veils as those
jealous rascals the Turks and Arabs do at the present day, we do not
know, and we are not now going to enquire: we only wish to protest, _en
passant_, against these same modern Eastern veils; they are the most
frightful, unclassical, unbecoming things ever invented as face-cases.
Our present purpose is with the head-dress of modern British ladies--let
us look into their bonnets.

And truly a bonnet, taken by itself, without the jewel that often lies
under it--a bonnet _per se_--is as bad a thing as a hat; something
between a coal-scuttle and a bread-basket; it is only fit to be married
to the hat, and, let us add--settled in the country. But it is,
nevertheless capricious in its ugliness, just as its possessor is
capricious in her prettiness; for, look at it from behind, its lines do
not greatly deviate from the circular form of the head; it seems like a
smart case;--lo