attitude awaiting, sword in hand, the oncoming of a maddened bull; or a troop of merry-eyed peasant girls grouped around some old Moorish fountain or well-head. Many Spanish fans are

merely the elaborate programme of some state bull-fight, adorned with the portraits of both the bulls and the fighters, and used only once.

Some very pretty canal subjects are found on old Dutch fans. Quaint Flemish scenes by the side of blue canals with trawlers and old-world craft. Other Dutch fans are of horn pierced and stained saffron colour. The Dutch genre subject and the seascape are well represented on the fan mount. There are miniature sea views with sandbanks and sailors and fishing boats, long banks of dark clouds and grey angry billows, such as Van de Velde loved to paint the Zuyder Zee, or quiet inland scenes and quaint old churches and gable roofed houses beside placid canals, where the rising moon throws a mysterious blue glimmer over the trees and the reeds and the windmills, and the sleeping hamlets-having the dreamy reposefulness of Van der Neer.

French Fans.--The French fan is the queen of fans. The artistry that has gone to embellish these trifles has raised them to a pinnacle of magnificence equalled only by the snuff box of the same era. Many of them represent pastorals and revels and masquerades from the brush of Watteau Antoine, when he was "Painter of Gallant Feasts to the King." The splendour of the French court, its

gaiety and insouciance, is reflected on the fan mount. Madame de Sevigné lives again in these fluttering leaves. The Vernis-Martin fan she sent to her daughter, as recounted in her Lettres, representing Madame de Montespan as Venus at her toilet, surrounded by her attendant goddesses, was exhibited in London a century afterwards, having survived the Revolution. It was a time in France when the sceptre of woman was a power at court. L'éventail plus puissant commande même aux rois. Projecting himself into those days of the pomps and vanities of Louis Quinze, Mr. Dobson writes his Ballade " On a Fan that belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour " which commences :

Chicken-skin, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Vanloo,
Loves in a riot of light,

Roses and vaporous blue;

Hark to the dainty frou frou !
Picture above if you can,

Eyes that could melt as the dew,-
This was the Pompadour's fan!

When Marie Antoinette, "glittering glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy," held her mimic court at the Trianon on the green pleasaunces of Versailles and played at Arcadian simplicity, the fan mount held the mirror to these naïve frivolities. There was no thunder in the air yet. No peasants with blood-red pikes held aloft the heads of aristocrats.

not perfected his invention.

M. Guillotine had
The Bastille was

bathed in quiet sunshine, no starving mob threatened its stone-bound fastnesses. But there were omens even on the fan mount.

There were other fans which told another story. The fan had become popular up and down France. These were not of Dutch paper such as etchers used, nor vellum, nor fine silk, they were of plain coarse paper with plain wooden guards. On these mounts were printed lampoons in verse, with irony such as only the Gallic pen can produce. Political lampoons and satirical caricatures made the fan a vehicle for the record of current events, it resembled the pack of playing cards in this respect, and the potter's clay was another vehicle for disseminating propaganda. The Rouen Museum shows a collection of such plates.

The fashionable court fan depicted gay shepherds playing on the lute or kneeling at the feet of their mistresses, who with dainty ribboned crook and slim tightly laced bodice and pink frock are seated on green hillocks, archly trifling with their adorers.

English Eighteenth-Century Fans.-It is Addison, in his Spectator, who humorously suggests that at the opera or at the playhouse those of the fair sex who oppose the designs of the Pretender might arm themselves with "certain fans of a Protestant make," which would contain pictures and designs of a more or less satirical nature, exposing the errors of the Church of Rome, so that by opening them in the faces of the opponents

of the established government, they might show them the errors they were contending for. every lady will of course study her fan," continues the essayist, she will be a perfect mistress of the controversy, at least in one point of Popery; and as her curiosity will put her upon the perusal of every other fan that is fashionable, I doubt not but that in very little time there will be scarce a woman of quality in Great Britain who would not be an overmatch for an Irish priest." Whether any of the Whig ladies who frequented Holland House, or who fluttered down the galleries of Hampton Court, adopted this fashion in fans we do not know, as time has not always dealt with an equal hand with trifles such as these of generations long since passed away. The toys of the children of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been preserved to posterity, but many of the fans of the eighteenth century are gone for ever.

It was not, however, till 1709 that the Company of Fan Makers was incorporated by letters patent from Queen Anne. English fans display considerable art and are eagerly sought after by collectors. Angelica Kauffmann has left several examples of her delicacy in the art of decorating the fan mount. There is one from her brush at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The subjects of many of the fans of the English school are taken from old plays. "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "The Merchant of Venice," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet" are fre