Sunday evening

John Whitford, 1890 The sun is about to set. Do our ears deceive us? No! It is a military band, and there come the soldiers, a very French-looking edition of soldiers indeed. They enter the Grand Square, march round its open area, and draw up in a circle at one end. Fashionables, like evening moths, begin to flutter around the centre of attraction. Gentlemen in the latest cut of English habiliments appear, and walk by themselves. Then come ladies, also by themselves, two and two, with dark tresses, black eyes, and the gauzy graceful folds of the deservedly immortal mantilla. They whisper their pretty sayings only to each other, though exhibiting the inimitable working of their fans to everybody.

Little young ladies also come out, dressed in the most absurd degree of the British boarding-school miss; and what with their tiny bonnets on the back of their heads, their short petticoats sticking out behind, and their laced-up silk boots, one cannot fancy them descended from those ideal beings so aristocratically veiled in the mantilla.

Charles Piazzi Smyth, Tenerife: An Astronomer’s Experiment (1858)