The ephemeral 'rages' for certain periods and styles to which the fashionable world has ever been subject may be variously accounted for. Often they seem to be born of air, and changed by a breath with no tangible raison d'etre. The present rage for 'Queen Anne' objects of every description is exceedingly odd - the looseness with which people use the term is more so.

As plate earlier than Anne became scarce, it was natural enough for ' silvermaniacs' to take refuge in Queen Anne spoons and saltcellars, and from this the step to contemporary tables and chairs was easily made, and the transition from these in the costumes in harmony with them would seem equally simple; but in all this the artistic gain is more than doubtful.

The vague space of time now bearing Anne's name - as a rule, much longer and much later than her life, for it certainly stretches from one end of the eighteenth century to the other - was marked by an absence of the artistic feeling so complete and so conscious, that scarcely any attempt was made to vary the few inoffensive forms which satisfied the public. Straight lines, the skeleton of the classicism of the seventeenth century, were so prevalent, that Hogarth protested by cutting on his palette 'the line of beauty' - a curve. All was formal, stiff, and, on the whole, ugly.

When people say 'Anne' they generally mean 'George,' which is hard on Anne, who, coming to the throne late in life, and adorning it but briefly, ought fairly, if she claims anything, to claim the entire period from, say, her marriage in 1683 (two years before Charles II. died), to her own death in 1714; a period less blank and hopeless in beauty than that immediately succeeding, which was ruled by the two first kings of the House of Hanover. Anne was the last of the Stuart dynasty, and, by reason both of the brevity of her sway and her own unostentatious disposition, never had sovereign less influence upon the aesthetic tendencies of her age.

In dress, in furniture, in plate, in architecture, in nearly every department of art, though all pseudo-classic, Charles II.'s time stands high. The period which may be said to have begun with George III., boasting some reforms in dress, Chippendale's goods, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, had also much to please an artist's eye. The period between the two involved a reaction against the corrupt luxury of the court, and made itself felt as to furniture, in straight lines and discomfort - the fashions imported from Holland: as to dress, in whalebone, buckram, and unwieldiness, a direct contradiction to the beauteous laisser aller which had outrun itself shortly before. Perhaps the fashionable falsities were a sort of protest against too much candour. How artistically hideous the reaction was, a very little thought makes clear. Let us see what the fashions during Anne's life actually were. Born in 1664, Anne may have seen the undulating negligence of satin- and pearl-clad beauties glide about her cradle; may have worn some Lely-fashion herself before her father reigned. At nineteen (when she married) she may have sported the new 'Fontange,' or commode ironically so called. She may have rejoiced in a 'paire of lockes and curls ' wired out on end.

She probably decked her pleasant frenndlich face with the stars and the black coach and horses which are seen in all their grace and expressiveness in engravings of the period. This is the more likely, as the mass of patches was no new fashion in 1683, but had been thirty years in vogue already, and was still the scorn of satirists. Bulwer in his 'Artificial Changeling,' 1650, first alludes to this. 'It is well,' he says, 'if one black patch will serve to make their faces remarkable, for some fill their visages full of them, varied into all manner of shapes and figures;' some of which I have illustrated in 'The Art of Beauty' (figs. 63 and 80); while the author of 'God's Voice against Pride and Apparel,' in 1683 (the year of Anne's marriage), declares that the black patches remind him of plague spots, 'and methinks the mourning coach and horses all in black, and plying on their foreheads, stands ready harnessed to whirl them to Acheron.' Anne probably squeezed her waist into a V form (as in fig. 3), and walked out in the clumsy garb buried in furbelows which we may admire in many old prints, or even sported the masculine coat, waistcoat, and walking-cane held about 1700 to be the 'height of taste,' and slung at her side a light rapier, and tucked her cocked hat under her arm, like other ladies.

At any rate, these were the vagaries of fashion in Anne's youth. At its quietest, the costume of ordinary mortals was terribly stiff, heavy, and inconvenient; not to say unclean, considering the mass of powder scattered in the air by the men's periwigs alone. Anne's retiring nature and complete subservience to the Duchess of Marlborough, who was too much given to the state intrigue to trouble herself with costume, may have inclined her personally to the least obtrusive forms then fashionable; but it must also have led her not to disregard the 'mode.'

Fig. 3. - From an old wood-cut, circa 1690.

To those who, possessing early eighteenth century furniture, are properly desirous of dressing in harmony with it, I may suggest the kind of attire belonging to their favourite period, by quoting advertisements of losses in the reign of Anne. Here is one: ' A black silk petticoat, with a red and white calico border; cherry-coloured stays, trimmed with blue and silver; a red and dove-coloured damask gown, flowered with large trees; a yellow satin apron trimmed with white Persian, and muslin head cloths with crowsfoot edging; double ruffles with fine edging, a black silk furbelowed scarf, and spotted hood.' (From the 'Post Boy,' November 15, 1709.)

Here is another costume, advertised for in 1712: 'A green silk knit waistcoat, with gold and silver flowers all over it, and about fourteen yards of gold and silver thick lace on it' (no mean quantum for one waistcoat!), 'and a petticoat of rich strong flowered satin, red and white, all in great flowers or leaves, and scarlet flowers with black specks brocaded in, raised high like velvet or shag.'

If the result is somewhat vulgar in its tasteless display of inappropriate colours and immoderate ornaments, it will not be my fault but the fault of Queen Anne. Thus and thus Queen Anne was robed, and the men were as many-coloured and as refulgent as the ladies.

The chief feature, however, of woman's dress, during the whole space of Anne's life, was the singular indelicacy, which may be studied in the pictures and the satires contemporaneous by those who wish to copy the costume. Scarlet shag flowers and scores of yards of gold braid will be powerless to revive the times of Anne without this feature. The whole bust must be unflinchingly exposed as it was when Richard Buxton published his book, 'A just and seasonable Reprehension,' and when another divine prayed, 'Lord, hast Thou any mantoes for ladies, made after Thine own fashion, which shall cover all their naked shoulders, and breasts, and necks, and adorn them all over? - where are they?' Anne lived through two periods of the commode, that terrific edifice of gummed lace shooting up from the head crestwise, of which Addison, in the character of the 'Spectator,' wrote in the year 1711: 'I remember several ladies that were very near seven feet high that at present want some inches of five;' and which sprouted shortly after higher than ever, like lopped trees that gain new vigour to sprout by lopping.

And this Queen presided over the introduction of the great hoop petticoat which Hogarth a little later caricatured or did not caricature (see page 157); as also that ugly modern patten with a ring beneath the sole, so much the reverse of an improvement upon the ancient clog. She died in 1714.

The head-dresses then worn were, for the most part, almost as large as could be grappled with by the strength of the spine. The wigs of the men floated to the waist, and were so powdered that their coats were 'as white as a miller's, their faces besmeared with snuff.' The ladies wore cushions and powder as well as large disfiguring patches, surmounted by heavy caps, with broad lappets spread over the shoulders and formally pinned in place.