from the lower to the higher, from inorganic to organic objects, and through these to more perfect animal life, we find a steady increase in the beauty of form, a reduction of it to a standard ever more severe and exacting, and a corresponding falling away of gorgeous colors, changeable forms, shifting and variable effects. Thus, clouds, flowers, foliage, shells, insects, are very variable in outline and yet more so in colors. They gain character by masses and numbers, give rise to a gay, sprightly, indefinite effect, and supply the under-current of our transient pleasures rather than the objects which hold possession of the mind and fill it with passion. Birds, higher up the scale, still retain gayety of colors, but unite it to forms and motions and notes of a more definite and finished nature; while the still nobler animals owe most of the impressions they make to pure form and distinctly expressed character. It is this which renders the features of the lion so significant that they are the occasion of some of the best effects of sculpture, as seen in the works of Thorwaldsen and Canova. In man, "the paragon of animals," the entire emphasis of construction is laid on form and features; and the health which gives full development to the one, and the commanding endowments which fill the others with spiritual power, and disclose them as the seat of a rational spirit, are the inlying forces of this most finished product of divine art. We know not by what principle of taste, by what canon of wise criticism men can, in dress, fall off from these conditions of progress and disguise significant form with meaningless and even monstrous form; hide native motion and carriage, and displace character and spiritual endowment with the ephemeral effects of extreme fantastic, fatuous fashion.

We have called fashion fantastic, and if the epithet be a just one, it goes far to decide the question whether dress springs from a real love of the beautiful and finds any sufficient justification in it. Few losses would be greater than for us, especially in consideration of the bias of American character, to sacrifice the truly beautiful even to a high degree of utility. A misfortune even greater than this would be, however, to misconceive and humble beautify itself in our alleged pursuit of it.

Beauty, being an inherent quality of objects, springing out of apt, constructive, and fitting relations, will, under essentially the same conditions, remain from year to year, from century to century,

as the products of Grecian art are still enthroned in Christian art. What, therefore, can fashion, that varies under no known law, that shifts incessantly merely to escape itself, have to do with beauty, that rests on a throne as firm in its symmetry, grandeur, and enduring finish as that of virtue itself! Take any article of dress, a bonnet, for instance; let the cunning fingers of the hour shape and adorn it till all female critics exclaim upon it as "a stylish thing,"

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a perfect love of a thing!" Now restore it unharmed to its box, and let two years pass before it shall again see the light. What wonderful change has befallen it, that when now criticised it has become laughable and absurd, in girlish parlance, "awful;" something that cannot be given away, that would ruin the peace of mind of any votary of dress. Does beauty, then, steal away like perfume? Is it a volatile gas that escapes under the tightest corking? Ah, it never was beautiful, for it never was fitted, admirably or otherwise, to any use on earth or under the earth, save, perchance, the wretched one of tickling with vanity the modicum of brains it is able to cover. The discarded trinket has grown shabby without service and laughable without change. A remnant of yesterday's masquerade, it should have been burned when the farce was over. The taint of last year's folly is in it, as certainly and distinguishably as the smell of the debauch of the previous evening in a shut-up bar-room.

It is fortunate alone in being capable of destruction, unlike the crinoline, that dismal skeleton of fashion which tangles us in the garret, trips us behind the garden-wall, and turns up as the last thing that choked the gutter.

Fashion is a wanton, fleet of foot, casting backward on those who pursue her tantalizing, contemptuous glances; yet provoking and stimulating their futile speed by those idle badges of distinctions which she drops in the heat of the race for the foremost.

Whatever might be the gains of sober taste in the wealthier classes by an emancipation in dress, it is very sure that these would become greater, very much greater, as we pass downward in the scale of expenditure. The poor, and those of more moderate means, suffer severely from the tyrannies of fashion and gain little from its elegancies.

Whatever merit the long dress may have when it sweeps, in rich folds, a Wilton carpet, disappears when it hangs in lank, thin

plaits, that speak only of the scanty protection and uncompensated discomforts of poverty. Nothing could look as badly, constructed on principles of use, as do these shabby outlines of showy dress, descending upon those to whom they bring neither the solace of vanity nor the protection of service. To these fickle, vexatious, and ill-adapted styles of our Christian life, we oppose the sturdy sense of the Turk, the Chinaman, or Malay, who, with loose pants and flowing jacket, meet composedly a thousand years.

Have we not fairly made this point, much as we have improved in dress, there is still room for improvement in the simplicity of its construction, the freedom it shall confer, and in its graceful adaptation to the human form, to the exclusion of artificial, complex, and meaningless outline.

Society is a system of delicate dependencies and reciprocal responsibilities. There are few actions, the motives and reasons of which are not found in large part beyond the constitution and character of those who perform them in the character and constitution of society. Society revolves by the meshing of many wheels into each other, and the size, form, revolution of each wheel are determined by those adjacent. The vanity of a wife and daughter is also the vanity of a husband and father, and the frivolity and feebleness of one sex are the election of both.

It would certainly seem unkind and unjust to hold the nation responsible for every folly the Grant family may perpetrate. Yet Mrs. Fred. Grant would have fewer motives to make her underclothing that astonishing thing that we are assured it is, were there not papers ready to devote a column or half column to telling us all about it, what it cost, how many bones were included in her bridal-corset, and at what points the perfumes were stitched in. When we erect a hot-house for fools we must expect to raise a few.

what they are by the ordinaTheir alteration will involve a be accomplished directly, in

Female character and dress are tion, the constitution of society. wide revolution of ideas and cannot stantly, as one puts on or off a coat. We are the more willing to criticise dress, because we know that it unconsciously springs from and expresses the spontaneous and wide-spread tendencies of men, and indicates in its excellencies and in its defects, the emotional, reciprocal, reactionary relations of the sexes. Women are extreme, persistent, sensitive in dress, because they meet eyes, that with

slight intellectual discrimination, go in search of this tawdry show. If one-half of the community are to be fed through their senses, it will be laid as a duty on the remaining half to feed them; and we can only withhold the food as we arrest the appetite. We doubt whether anywhere the real relation of the sexes, the essential dependence of the one, and the courteous yet sensual tyranny of the other, find better expression than in a fashionable assembly. Many captives and rich spoils were not more necessary to the sturdy Roman general, attending him in his triumph and gracing his power, than are richly dressed women, in the wantonness of physical effect, to the libertine, or to the sober citizen who looks upon their possession as the last luxury of social life, the final symbol of wealth and position. That the real dignity, knowledge, power of woman, the free, intelligent, happy government of her life should be largely sacrificed to appearances that are in the last analysis sensual, grounded neither in utility nor in taste, finding no upward bent either in the gains of body or mind, stamp society, and that, too, in its most brilliant manifestations, among its alleged victories of elegant refinement, as essentially gross, humbling its brightest and best possessions and those who should be its redeeming spirits to an intercourse running on the low grade of sensuous impressions, and this also more profoundly in the under-current of thought than in the upper-current of language and appearance.

To alter dress, therefore, to correct the tastes which now give it law, is to profoundly alter society; to give more purity, more spiritual insight to men, a disposition to a more generous partnership in their intellectual life; and to women, a more sturdy self-respect, an opportunity more deeply to develop and freely to assert their individuality, an ability to bring in an untrammeled way their own contributions to the material and spiritual wealth of the race. Many other things are influential in the regeneration of society, but few things would call for a more thorough correction of low instinctive tendencies and stolid judgments, which men and women have brought with them out of barbarism, have been busy since the flood in confirming, as a street is trampled hard by hob-nails and gaiters, than a return of dress, in both sexes, to the simple uses of life and those adornments which these ends, taken in connection with the supremacy of character, admit of. More than equal laws, more than joint education, more than free labor, more than the

ballot, would this one change avail, by which the inner and outer life of woman, life at home and abroad, should become her own in its time, its thoughts, its untrammeled powers; more than any of these, since through them all, through that mental independence and renovation which they are to secure, can it alone be reached. Superficial as we deem dress, the forces which control it lie deeper, are reached with more difficulty than those involved in any of these intermediate changes.

Dress is to social influence what language is to national intercourse. It yields only to those deep-seated tendencies that control the feelings from which it springs. The connection of dress and education is most immediate. Education, co-education, is to give that enlarged intelligence, that increased self-respect, which are to furnish forth character with new power and beauty, and enable it easily to bow to itself the accidents of life expressed in dress. A simple dress, on the other hand, is to emancipate physical forces, now so wastefully consumed by it, and give the needed health and strength for higher pursuits.

It may well be doubted, whether a judicious college course is as taxing, day by day, to physical resources, as is woman's dress with its persistent restrictions and unending worry.

If, then, the dominion of fashion is so firm, if it yields neither to reason nor ridicule, scarcely cares to notice either the philosopher or the satirist, why strike one's head against it?

Those limited coteries, in which some outre costume has found acceptance, have not always answered this question wisely. Costumes, though reaching in a fair degree the physical ends of dress, have met with no acceptance, and have even deepened, by making open and bitter, the prejudices which they encounter. The sensitive, irritable mood of society on this subject has not been sufficiently regarded; nothing has been done to break the transition; no time has been given for a change of feelings. Nor have the new garments, strange and ultra to the eye, been sufficiently softened by the secondary devices of taste, and the associations of character. There has not been time for the formation of counter feelings, and occasionally the bold, harsh nature which has made these changes possible to the parties that have entered on them, has added to the offense. Dress rests for justification on the feelings, and can not at once, therefore, be altered by a syllogism. A logical victory over