The Follies and Fashions of our Grandfathers (1807). By Andrew
W. Taer. (Field and Tuer.)—This rather costly volume, with its curious brown-paper cover, is " embellished with thirty-seven whole- page plates, hand-coloured," including the fashion-plates of the year Mr. Tuer has undertaken to illustrate. He has chosen his letterpress from twenty-four of the magazines read by our grandparents in 1807, his object being, no doubt, to select what is most characteristic of the period, and at the same time the ablest of the papers written. These are not creditable to the taste of an age in which the greatest poets and writers of the century were living. There is scarcely an essay or a criticism in these journals worthy of insertion in a third-rate magazine of our own time, with the exception, perhaps, of a dramatic criticism upon John Kemble'a Hamlet. Walter Scott's ballade are condemned for the affectation of simplicity, and his highly successful volume of " Lyrical Pieces" is said to be "discreditable." "With a genius," says the reviewer, "that might have improved and honoured his time, he [Scott] has written works which have injured and degraded it." Wordsworth, as the reader will conjecture, comes off more badly still, and the reviewer "never saw anything better calculated to excite disgust and anger in a lover of poetry than the " Poems in Two Volumes." Indeed, we are told that " the drivelling nonsense of some of Mr. Wordsworth's poems is insufferable." Some of the eights and amusements of "eighty years since" are still familiar to us. Oar grandfathers had their Cattle Show at Christmas, their Royal Academy Exhibition, their cricket-matches, their races, and the pigeon-shooting which disgraces Harlingham. Happily, we have ceased publicly to tolerate oock-fighting, then a popular amusement. During Easter week, in Newcastle, 288 cocks were fought in one pit ; we read also of a bull-bait, one of the familiar sports of the period ; and there is a ludicrous account of Bartholomew Fair, which was opened, according to time-honoured custom, by the Lord Mayor. The life of that time may be read in the paragraphs of news with which the volume abounds, for in 1807 magazines filled to some extent the place now occupied by special newspapers. Among the "embellishments " are several drawings of "the beauteous Lady Hamilton," by Romney ; tint the fashion-plates form, perhaps, the most attractive part of a volume full of suggestiveness to the student of social life. The gentlemen of that time, no doubt, eat a brave figure in their olive-green, pea-green, or dark-blue coats, with velvet collars and gilt buttons, their Indian nankin breeches, waistcoats of fine white Marseilles quilting, and snow-white, narrow-ribbed silk stockings. Of the ladies' fashions, we may say at least that they do not injure the figure as it is injured nowadays. If our grand- mothers had graceful forms, the dressmaker and the corset-maker did not greatly interfere to mar them.
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