strous, and can, no more than deformity or misshapen growth in the animal kingdom, commend itself to taste. The works of art and the products of nature, all recognize this dependence. The beauty of the plant and the animal, come in connection with the highest fulfillment of their own economy and functions. The cathedral and the palace owe their grandeur to their enlarged and powerful ministrations to certain wants of body and mind. Everywhere it is the useful that gives direction and restraint to art, and that utility, no matter how high or how low it is, which calls forth a production, must define its form, aptness, felicity of execution. Beauty lingers over, elaborates and brings to a delicate finish, that which utility merely would have more hastily accepted as sufficient to its purpose. Dress, then, in habitually setting aside the obvious utilities it should pursue, is as lawless under art, as untrue to the ends of beauty, as it is unfaithful to the first simple interests we commit to it. Some articles of ornament are in entire neglect of use, others are directly at war with it. Of the first class are rings, bracelets, ear-rings. These are evidently barbarous in their derivations, a remnant of that early, rude period in which no suffering was spared, nor any annoyance rejected, that lay in the line of some startling, savage effect. In the absence of garments, figures and colors were tattooed into the skin, and long welts raised upon it; the lip was distended with a ring, and ornaments hung about the person as they could find points of attachment; wristlets and anklets, ear-rings and nose-rings, alike subserved one purpose, and had one justification. The ears still furnish too facile a point of suspension to be over-looked, though the nose has lost its prerogative, and been compelled to fall back on purely physical function. The twirling of the moustache, with inward or outward, upward or downward, bend, affords however, a feeble substitute to a portion of the race.

The second class, or garments at war with all uses, we have seen to include the larger share of the female wardrobe.

Another obvious principle would seem to be that garments fulfilling a wholly secondary function, ought to be secondary in the pression they are intended to produce. Clothes, as in union with the most perfect physical form, should submit to and indicate that form. Artists have, in painting especially, met with a serious difficulty in the garments of their figures. If the fashions of the

times are followed, a dress in itself, perhaps, extravagant and absurd, its ugliness further enhanced by the divergence of later styles, presents difficulties they cannot well escape; sometimes to the extent of greatly reducing and marring the grand effect. An historical picture becomes a display of costumes rather than of characters, and is liable at first sight to impress the observer as an ugly collection of oddities, to be deciphered and translated into the language of human passion, with such labor and perplexity as one might encounter in searching for his friends in a masked ball. The difficulty has been often evaded by the substitution of classical drapery. This has the advantage that it presents in itself a form at once graceful and secondary; and the greater advantage that it gives constant and bold hint of the outline beneath, hanging from it, or lying free and close upon it. Thus art, placed between an anachronism and an absurdity, naturally chooses the former. Our garments, especially those of women, are artistically objectionable in presenting a complex, independent, ungraceful and meaningless form; in even going further, and indicating distortions of form, which nature, in all her slips and malfeasance, rarely knows anything of. Waists, slopes of the back, attitudes, are presented, fortunately as foreign to symmetrical, erect, agile life, as they are to beauty.

The camel and the dromedary have been an enigma to me. I have been reluctant to call any living thing ugly, yet how avoid it in these cases? The flabby, splay-foot; the coarse, half-bare, halfhairy hide; the callous knees, the shuffling gait, and, to crown all, the unwholesome hump-yet just at this point, fashion comes in to correct our crude opinion, and take to itself a model.

That fashion is utterly divorced from art, is but too plainly indicated in these monstrosities which it takes so much pains to construct, and forces into notice with such hardihood. Those savage fancies reappear in them, which in some tribes establish or enhance abnormal developments, by way of giving distinction amid the monotony of merely symmetrical, well-formed limbs. The body of man, in its pre-eminent beauty, abjures this distortion and misrepresentation, and does not easily brook the obstruction to its force, occasioned by the complex forms of garments utterly alien to it, and, therefore, meaningless. The dress of men, while meeting in a satisfactory manner its daily uses, is often subject in a high degree to this objection of form. The human limbs are chalked out

and left, as it were, in the rough. The more the styles of coat and trowsers are made complex, shifting, finical, the more is this difficulty of independent and meaningless form enhanced; in this case, with the added difficulty of a measure of caricature, in the awkward approaches, at once near and far off, to the concealed limbs. A sailor's rig, of loose shirt and flowing pants, has permanent and picturesque power, simply because it does less, suggests more, and leaves itself out of the pale of observation.

The dress-coat, known to the irreverent as the swallow-tail, which the fashionable world assigns to waiters, whether as courtiers, they wait on princes, or as servants, on tables, is a surprisingly formless nondescript, that has in it no suggestion of use or honor. It may in the first instance have been stolen from his satanic majesty, and been designed in his case to keep warm the roots of his power. Yet more do the intellectual and emotional powers of manhood and womanhood scorn and resent this constant obtrusion and rivalry of dress. Society is to such a degree dependent on the tricks and artifices of dress, has so much more profound trust in silks than in the frankness of free, intelligent life, that a great entertainment is measured and chronicled by the display that is elicited, the new, various and rich goods that were exhibited; as if the occasion were an industrial fair in brilliant disguise, in which certain splendidly gotten-up lay-figures, manikins, representing the best achievements of various mercantile houses, were made to pass through the evolutions and the initial chit-chat of actual life. One is interested in the actions of such an assembly much as he would be in the coquetry, rapid motions, and proud display of an excited coterie of the birds of Paradise, with the important exception, that the one class is working at the top of its capacities, and the other has humbled its capacities to this paltry exhibition.

It is of such an assembly and of such society that Farquhar makes one of his characters say, "Pride is the life of a woman and flattery is our daily bread." The intellect and soul of man will not suffer this rivalry of dress. The higher elements are in inverse ratio to the lower. There must be and there will be subordination and if we refuse to establish it in favor of the mind and heart, it will establish itself in behalf of brilliant colors and rustling robes. Few feel the need of, or are able to secure or to use, the devices and rival effects of spiritual beauty and sensual display. Mind, when it

is present, powerfully present, touches matter with a masterly hand, yet with one so coy and delicate as to distort nothing from its office, lose none of its own supremacy, turn not a single eye aside from itself, or leave one relaxed, idle thought to travel off to its garments in search of interest and amusement. On the other hand, when these are engrossing, they have a language and character quite their own, call forth peculiar emotions, and leave the mind at a long remove from sprightly thought and animated sentiment. There would be a superfluity, a lack of economy in sound speech, coming from one in the wrapt presentation and handling of showy dress, quite out of keeping with nature's ordinary frugality and unity of impression, and wholly irrelevant to the wants of the parties concerned. The moment manhood and womanhood begin to take the reins of intellectual and moral power, that love is enthroned on the regal brow of thought, there is a falling off of these irrelevant accidents of life, a sinking into light and graceful government of these passing conditions of the hour. The precept of the apostle, "Whose adorning, let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart," is a command resting on a basis as sound esthetically as ethically. There is no high human beauty in which the mind and heart do not merely stand pre-eminently out, but in which they do not hold, in easy, habitual subjection, all their physical conditions, direct and indirect. Society, as a rule, is frivolous, foolish, even vicious, according to the degree in which it gives itself to that form of taste which finds expression in personal adornments. It therein misses the real gist of human beauty, on its physical as well as spiritual side, for the beauty of the body even is of that simple, high art that will not suffer itself to be over-laid with tawdry ornament. As the statue admits of no decoration, must stand by itself with its own sufficient graces, so real beauty hides out of sight the ornament that has been put upon it, and not till it has done this, do we understand how regal it is.

If it be said, most persons lack striking beauties, either of body or of mind, and should be allowed, therefore, to cover the deficienand atone for it by the attractions of dress, certainly, we answer, if these are the attractions of dress thus offered. We decline so to

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regard costliness, things whose estimate depends on a knowledge of

their trade-mark, and which stand in no connection of fitness and wise adaptation to the persons who wear them.

There are two features in dress which are always pleasing; simplicity-a strict subordination to the uses of the wearer-and individuality, a mental flavor caught from the soul itself, a skillful adjustment to peculiarities of character or position. Any effort to secure impression by dress in neglect of these qualities is essentially vulgar, and can only be pleasing to an uncultivated taste that accepts the cheap substitute of display for the truly costly qualities of an admirable and pervasive character, touching all about it to transform and elevate it.

Garments in themselves showy and conspicious are best worn, if worn at all, by those of striking and independent personal endowments. Military dress is usually very observable, often loaded with tinsel; and nothing certain is more ridiculous than the strut and show of a military pageant when it is gotten up by peaceable, contented citizens, who, perplexed by their exercise and hampered by their arms, cannot even awe the rabble that crowd, jostle and jeer them. Something of the danger of battle, the prestige of heroic exploits, and the stern endurance and authority of real service are requisite to lift into fear, and thus respect the bearer of all this blue and crimson and gold, and prevent his becoming game even to the sharp eyes of the boys and the shallow eyes of the populace.

A woman of superior beauty, commanding carriage and sparkling endowments, may, indeed, be richly dressed, and others be scarcely aware of the fact under the much more brilliant impression of her personal qualities; but so can she be simply dressed and call that simplicity to the aid of her speech and bearing. That one should owe very much to dress, be able to command position by means of it, or in this way confer any real pleasure aside from its identification with character, is only possible in superficial society, more gratified by the senses than the taste, more occupied with the forms and conditions of life than with its intellectual insights and spiritual pleasures. We insist, then, that the love of dress in the meaning which these words now bear, springs from an essentially uncultivated, superficial, vulgar mind, and tends strongly to maintain it.

This relation of endlessly-shifting, complex, and showy garments to beauty is also indicated by what we see in nature. As we pass