conscientiously to-day. Such is not our business in this light chapter.

One cannot exactly say for what motive the Sunshade was carried by young virgins in all the processions in the Thesmophoria, the festivals of Eleusis, and the Panathenæa. Aristophanes calls the baskets and the white Sunshades “symbolic instruments, destined to recall to human beings the acts of Ceres and Proserpine.”

An archæologist might amuse himself with writing a special work on the rôle of the Sunshade in Greece; documents would not fail him; nay, the book would soon grow big, and might bristle with notes from all quarters, abounding in the margins, after the example of those good solid volumes of the sixteenth century, which none but a hermit would have the leisure to read conscientiously to-day. Such is not our business in this light chapter.

One cannot exactly say for what motive the Sunshade was carried by young virgins in all the processions in the Thesmophoria, the festivals of Eleusis, and the Panathenæa. Aristophanes calls the baskets and the white Sunshades “symbolic instruments, destined to recall to human beings the acts of Ceres and Proserpine.”

Perhaps it is not necessary to search beyond this Aristophanic definition, which may on the whole entirely satisfy us. Moreover, these Sunshades were white, not, say they, because the statue erected by Theseus to Minerva was of that colour, but because white marked the liveliest joy and pomp according to Ovid, who recommends very carefully in his Fasti the wearing in sign of rejoicings white tunics worthy of pleasing Ceres, in whose cult both the priestesses and the things they used ought to be entirely white.

In a man, according to Anacreon, the carrying a Parasol was the mark of a libertine and effeminate life; one might draw an analogous conclusion from a scene in the Birds of Aristophanes, in which Prometheus, through fear of Jupiter, cries to his slave, before abandoning himself to a sweet passion for Venus only, “Quick, take this sunshade, and hold it over me, in order that the gods may not see me.”

It is also doubtless for the same reason, which virtually interdicted the use of the Parasol to men, that the daughters of the Metœci, or strangers domiciled at Athens, carried, according to Ælian, the sunshade of the Athenian women in the spectacles and public ceremonies, whilst the fathers carried the vases destined for the sacrifices.

The Θολἱα, or “Sunshade Hat,” succeeded the Parasol properly so called. It is of these Θολἱα that Theocritus speaks in several places; it is also this hat, and not a Sunshade, which we must see in the curious medal above, stamped by the Ætolians, which represents Apollo bearing this strange hat, in the style of Yokohama, hanging on his back.

From the most distant epochs the Sunshade has been considered, so far as it is the attribute of gods and sovereigns, as the ensign of omnipotence. We see it playing this supreme rôle, not only by right of an emblem of blazonry, in the curious dissertation of the Chevalier Beatianus On a Sunshade of vermeil on a field argent, symbol of power, sovereign authority and true friendship, but also we see it universally adopted as a sign of the highest distinction by Oriental peoples, to be displayed over the head of the king in time of peace, and occasionally in time of war.

It is thus that it may be contemplated on the sculptures of ancient Egypt, where its usage was not exclusively indeed reserved to the Pharaohs, but sometimes also to the great dignitaries, but to these only. There is to be seen in Wilkinson a strange engraving representing an Æthiopian princess seated on a plaustrum or carriage drawn by oxen, and having behind her a vague personage armed with a large Parasol of an undecided form, something between the screen and the flabellum in the segment of a circle. Is it not also in sign of adoration that it was the custom to put above the heads of divine statues crescents, Sunshades, little spheres, which served not only to guarantee these august heads against the injuries of time and the ordures of birds, but also to set their physiognomy in relief as by a nimbus or crown of paganism?

The kings or satraps of Persia of the oldest dynasties were sheltered by the sovereign Parasol. Chardin, in his Voyages, describes bas-reliefs of a time long before that of Alexander the Great, in which the king of Persia is frequently represented sometimes just about to mount his horse, at others surrounded by young slave-girls—beautiful as day, as a poet might write for sake of a simile—among whom one inclines a Sunshade, while another uses a flyflap made of a horse’s silky tail. Other bas-reliefs, again, represent the Persian monarch on a throne, at the conclusion of a victorious battle, whilst the rebels are being crucified, and writhe under the punishment, and prisoners brought up, one after the other, make humble submission. Here the Sunshade has the floating appearance of a glorious standard. It symbolised also the power of life and death, vested in the savage conqueror over the unfortunate conquered, delivered up wholly to his mercy.

In ancient India, the cradle of the human race, as it is said, the Parasol in every time, and more than anywhere else, is unfolded in its splendour and the grace of its contexture, as an immutable symbol of royal majesty. It seems really that it was under the deep azure of the admirable Indian sky that the coquettish instrument, of which we are exposing here by literary zigzags the historic summary, was invented. It must have been born there first as a fragile buckler to oppose the ardour of the sun; afterwards, doubtless, it developed, little by little, into a large dome, carried in the arms of slaves, or on the back