United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The walls were not incumbered by the portraits of those grim ancestors who frowned in mail, or smiled in fardingale on the walls of the adjacent galleries.
Mrs. Grey. What can you mean? Our fashion like that frightful rig? Why, see this portrait of Queen Elizabeth in full dress! What with stomacher and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs and ouches and jewels and puckers, she looks like a hideous flying insect with expanded wings, seen through a microscope, not at all like a woman. Grey.
Of another of these old portraits Horace Walpole writes: "A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded with crowns and powdered with diamonds, a vast ruff and still vaster fardingale, and a bushel of pearls, are the features by which everybody knows at once the pictures of Queen Elizabeth."
The monks had joined the mewsical chorus, and the lay visitor shrieked and been sore discomforted; but Abelard only cried, "What, are ye there, ye jealous miauling knaves? ye shall caterwaul to some tune to-morrow night. I'll fit every man-jack of ye with a fardingale." That this brutal threat had reconciled him to stay another day at Gerard's request. Gerard groaned.
Above, the Castle Rock was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's pictures the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies.
Confess, now, didst never wear fardingale ere to-day?" "Give me another handful, sweetheart, and I'll tell thee." "There! I said he was too handsome for a woman." "Ser Gerard, they have found me out," observed the Epicaene, calmly cracking an almond. The libertines vowed it was impossible, and all glared at the goddess like a battery.
Vanucci excused him. "I heard him say he had forgotten to provide himself with a fardingale. Comrades, the good lad is hunting for a beauty fit to take rank among these peerless dames. Consider the difficulty, ladies, and be patient!" At last Gerard was seen at some distance with a female in his hand. "She is long enough," said one of her sex, criticising her from afar.
There was the staid citizen, whose sobriety bordered on sternness, with hair closely cropped to avoid the "unloveliness of love-locks," covered with a large flapped peaked hat, and arrayed in broad white band and sad-colored garments, on whose arm leaned his wife, or walked independently at his side, bearing on her head a hat of similar shape to her husband's, or else having it protected with hood, or cap, or coif; a white vandyke neckerchief falling over the shoulders, and rising high in the neck; long-waisted bodice of velvet or silk, open in front, and laced down to a point, on which was placed a rosette, with voluminous fardingale of like material, gathered up in folds behind, and supplying, though with more modesty and less bad taste, the place of the more modern "bishop," now happily banished these regions.
I have sought vainly for something interesting in the way of local colour, but can find nothing that even suggests the ingerence of a "fardingale" into the local history of Rudolph's reign. Instead of the gentler influence, I find only descriptions of swashbucklers, lackeys and bottlewashers, "ruffling" it in imitation of their masters.
Your wit and humour will be as much lost upon them, as if you talked the dialect of Chaucer; for with all the divinity of wit, it grows out of fashion like a fardingale. I am convinced that the young men at White's already laugh at George Selwyn's bon mots only by tradition.