Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/270

224 virgins used to wear their hair at their weddings." After dinner the Princess put on a dress embroidered with gold, and did up her hair.

This description of a Venetian wedding in the eighteenth century was by Lady Miller:—"All the ladies, except the bride, were dressed in their black gowns with large hoops; the gowns were straight-bodied with very long trains, the trains tucked up on one side of the hoop with a prodigious large tassel of diamonds. Their sleeves were covered up to their shoulders with falls of the finest Brussels lace, a drawn tucker of the same round the bosom, adorned with rows of the finest pearls, each the size of a gooseberry, till the rows descended below the top of the stomacher; then two rows of pearls, which came from the back of the neck, were caught up at the left side of the stomacher, and finished in two fine tassels. Their heads were dressed prodigiously high, in a vast number of buckles and two long drop curls in the neck. A great number of diamond pins and strings of pearls adorned their heads, with large sultanas, or feathers, on one side, and magnificent diamond ear-rings. The bride was dressed in cloth of silver made in the same fashion, and decorated in the same manner, but her brow was kept quite bare, and she had a fine diamond necklace and an enormous bouquet."

Lady Miller deserved to have lived in times when the conduct of the fashion paper was amongst the privileges of the high nobility.