The sobriety of taste and severity of style that characterise Scotswomen may be due, like Susanna Crum's dubieties, to the haar, to the shorter catechism, or perhaps in some degree to the presence of three branches of the Presbyterian Church among them; the society that bears in its bosom three separate and antagonistic kinds of Presbyterianism at the same time must have its chilly moments.
In Lord Cockburn's time the 'dames of high and aristocratic breed' must have been sufficiently awake to feminine frivolities to be both gorgeously and extravagantly arrayed.

I do not know in all literature a more delicious and lifelike word-portrait than Lord Cockburn gives of Mrs.Rochead, the Lady of Inverleith, in the Memorials.

It is quite worthy to hang beside a Raeburn canvas; one can scarce say more.
'Except Mrs.Siddons in some of her displays of magnificent royalty, nobody could sit down like the Lady of Inverleith.

She would sail like a ship from Tarshish, gorgeous in velvet or rustling silk, done up in all the accompaniments of fans, ear-rings, and finger-rings, falling sleeves, scent-bottle, embroidered bag, hoop, and train; managing all this seemingly heavy rigging with as much ease as a full-blown swan does its plumage.

She would take possession of the centre of a large sofa, and at the same moment, without the slightest visible exertion, cover the whole of it with her bravery, the graceful folds seeming to lay themselves over it, like summer waves.