king of. Plain beaver or
felt hats were worn by some of our farmers' wives as early as the reign
of Charles I.; but, to judge from the prints of that date, they borrowed
them from their husbands. And to a period like this is to be traced the
custom, still extant throughout most parts of Wales, for the women to
wear the same head-costume as the men. The round ladies' hat, however,
of the middle and end of the last century, may be seen in its primitive
state in those enormous circles of straw, brought from Tuscany, and sold
in our milliners' shops, fit to be pinched and cut into the prevailing
fashion. The hats, both of men and women--when once they had quitted the
becoming costume of the Middle Ages--arose out of one and the same type;
a large circle of stuff with a projecting central cap for the skull.
Human invention, in the matter of hats, seems for several centuries to
have rested in this solitary idea. When this circular adumbral and
pluvial roofing had to be adapted to the female head, it was found
advisable to fasten it down to the cranium--not, indeed, by any screw
driven therein, nor by any intriguing with the locks of woman's hair,
but by the simple expedient of ribands passing under the chin. The
difficulty consisted in attaching the upper ends of these ribands; for
if they were sewn on under the overlapping brim, the same brim would
take liberties on a windy day, and would flap up and down like an Indian
punka. If they were sewn outside, they acted like the sheets of a ship's
sail, and pulled down the struggling circumference into two ugly
projections, bellying out before and behind. However, women, for
comfort's sake, having got an awkward article to deal with, preferred
the latter alternative--tied down their hats with ribands, (men, be it
remembered, at the same time, tied _up_ their brims into the prim, high,
cocked shape,) and called these ugly coverings "gipsy hats." We remember
something like them, dear reader,

"When first we went a-gipsying, long long ago."

Before matters had arrived at this pitch of ugliness, the ladies of the
court of George III.--the very antipodes of that of Louis XIV.--had
essayed, under the auspices of good Queen Charlotte, to render the round
hat, with the straight-projecting brim, less ugly; but their invention
carried them no further than to surround it, at one time, with a deep
ruff of ribands, or they crushed it into an untidy rumble-tumble shape;
at another, they let