h she seeks to proscribe, shall
be for ever abjured and disused by the fair sex. As the prelude to that
full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed
for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt,
to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.

There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which
calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the
adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of
position and fortune"--of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever
those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success
depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making
simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best
situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style
of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate
their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount
of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of
success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in
vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.

Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was
permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the
public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the
columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the
sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in
this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the
toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"
to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe
attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the
fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The
correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are
living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the classical
period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the
female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the
Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and
when the multitude did not worship the drapery of the goddess only."

After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he
goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the
ladies are dre