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48 that it was not partial or transitory. A satire on the vanity of the ladies, written in England about the end of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a manuscript in the British Museum of that date, commences thus—"What shall we say of the ladies when they come to festivals? they look at each other's heads, and carry bosses like horned beasts; if any one be without horns, she becomes an object of scandal."

A Latin song on the venality of the Judges, preserved in an English manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century, speaking of the influence of the fair sex in procuring judgments, says,—"But if some noble lady, fair and lovely, with horned head, and that encircled with gold, come for judgment, she dispatches her business without having to say a word."

These horns are compared above to the horns of rams; perhaps we may be assisted in forming an idea of their shape by the consideration that the writers of the age apply the term horned to Bishops when wearing the mitre—thus in the Apocalypsis Goliæ Episcopi ,

We thus find in written documents a particularity of costume described very distinctly at a period when it has not yet been met with in any artistical monuments; a circumstance not easily accounted for, but which should make us cautious in judging too hastily of the absolute non-existence of any thing from mere negative evidence.