The finer adaptability of women makes them a little less uncomfortable amid such oppressive surroundings, and their tamer natures revolt from ridiculous excess. They listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of Polonius, and their habit is occasionally costlier than their purses can buy; witness that famous milliner’s bill for fifteen thousand pounds, which was disputed in the French courts during the gilded reign of Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punishment of their extravagances falls on themselves or on their husbands. They do not, as is the fashion with men, make their belongings a burden to their friends. It is seldom the mistress of a curio-laden house who insists with tireless perseverance on your looking at everything she owns; though it was a woman, and a provincial actress at that, raised by two brilliant marriages to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who came to Abbotsford accompanied by a whole retinue of servants and several private physicians, to the mingled amusement and despair of Sir Walter. And it was a flower girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired wealth in the most sumptuous entertainments ever known even to that city of costly caprice. But for stupid and meaningless luxury we must look, after all, to men: to Caligula, whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank out of an ivory trough; to Condé, who spent three thousand crowns for jonquils to deck his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of Albuquerque, who had forty silver ladders among his utterly undesirable possessions. Even in the matter of dress and fashion, they have exceeded the folly of women. It is against the gallants of Spain, and not against their wives, that the good old gossip James Howell inveighs with caustic humor. The Spaniard, it would seem, “tho’ perhaps he had never a shirt to his back, yet must he have a toting huge swelling ruff around his neck,” for the starching of which exquisitely uncomfortable article he paid the then enormous sum of twenty shillings. It was found necessary to issue a royal edict against these preposterous decorations, which grew larger and stiffer every year, even children of tender age wearing their miniature instruments of torture. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighs Burton with melancholy candor; but it is not without some small compensations of its own. To realize them, we might compare one of Murillo’s dirty, smiling, half-naked beggar boys with an Infanta by Velasquez, or with Moreelzee’s charming and unhappy little Princess, who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-trimmed stomacher, gazes at us with childish dignity from the wall of Amsterdam’s museum. Or we might remember the pretty story of Meyerbeer’s little daughter, who, after watching for a long time the gambols of some ragged children in the street, turned sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic resignation, “It is a great misfortune to have genteel parents.”