THE QUEEN'S BAL COSTUME".
THE idea is piquant of Queen Victoria and her courtiers assuming for one whole evening the dress and deportment of courts so obsolete yet so recent as those of Queen Anne and George the First. Going back to the age of the Black Prince was as good as a voyage into fairy-land ; but the assumption of last century's garb and gait reminds one of a playful child, with spectacles on nose, ensconced in an easy chair, saying, "Now I am grand- mamma."
- The costume of the early part of last century is picturesque after its own fashion. Its forms may be stiff, and to our notions uncouth ; but its colours are rich and varied. There is a Wateau- like charm about its groups ; and Pope has breathed a spirit of sentiment and even delicate fancy into its quaintness. The fairest and most elegant of our age may be proud if for one evening they can sustain the characters of "Youth's youngest daughter, fair Lepel," or the rainbow airy brightness and incessant change of " the.Cynthia of the minute." The real characters of the age, too, may pique the imitative ta- lent as well as its poetical fictions. Her Majesty may assume the character of Queen Anne; whose husband, the Lord. High Ad- miral, George of Denmark, Prince Albert's passion for the sea will qualify him to enact to the life. It would be difficult to find an imperious Dutchess of Marlborough among the amiable Ladies ef Victoria's Court ; but the Whig Ladies of the Bedchamber suggest that the part might be well supported by Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert Inglis might take orders for the evening, and enact Sacheverell. Ladies will be pulling caps for the character of Lady Mary Wortley Montague • and gentlemen for that of the dark, wily, and dazzling Bolingbroke. Lord Ashley might appear as Sir Roger de Coverley; and Lord Ellenborough as the Duke of Marlborough, (it is to be presumed that the lineal repre- sentative would not go to the expense to assert his right,) or Prince Eugene. . For dances, the elegance of Marlborough might be typified in a quadrille, the somewhat unclerical abruptness and impetuosity of Swiftin a mazurka, and the sleepy quiescence of good Queen Anne in a polonaise.
There is but one drawback—the necessity of concealing braided locks of jet and ringlets of auburn beneath a Mont Blanc of pow- der and pomatum. In the years of childhood we have listened to our grand-aunt detailing the events of the night before a race- ball, which the paucity of hairdressers in a country-town obliged her to pass in an arm-chair with her tete already made up, de- scribed with almost as much gusto as the ball itself. But to modern belles, the heavy, unctuous powdery coronal, appears to inspire nothing but disgust. Economy, too, has a word to say : the Queen is shrewdly suspected of complicity with Sir Robert Peel in the selection of an :era for her bal costume : all who are pre- emit will be brought within the tenth category of the Assessed 'Taxes schedule--" Persons having used hair-powder at any time between 5th April 1845 and 5th April 1846."
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