er, and that they ought to restrain the
vanity and worldliness of children and young people; but now, she says,
even before a girl is born, dress is the one thing needful,--the great
thing to be thought of; and so, in every step of the way upward, her
little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her
corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence,
as the one all-important object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is
dreadful, because she has maternal yearnings over our toilet successes
and fortunes; and we secretly think she is rather soured by old age, and
has forgotten how a girl feels."

"The fact is," said I, "that the love of dress and outside show has been
always such an exacting and absorbing tendency, that it seems to have
furnished work for religionists and economists, in all ages, to keep it
within bounds. Various religious bodies, at the outset, adopted severe
rules in protest against it The Quakers and the Methodists prescribed
certain fixed modes of costume as a barrier against its frivolities and
follies. In the Romish Church an entrance on any religious order
prescribed entire and total renunciation of all thought and care for the
beautiful in person or apparel, as the first step towards saintship. The
costume of the _religieuse_ seemed to be purposely intended to imitate
the shroudings and swathings of a corpse and the lugubrious color of a
pall, so as forever to remind the wearer that she was dead to the world
of ornament and physical beauty. All great Christian preachers and
reformers have levelled their artillery against the toilet, from the
time of St. Jerome downward; and Tom Moore has put into beautiful and
graceful verse St. Jerome's admonitions to the fair church-goers of his
time.

'WHO IS THE MAID?

'ST. JEROME'S LOVE.

'Who is the maid my spirit seeks,
Through cold reproof and slander's blight?
Has _she_ Love's roses on her cheeks?
Is _hers_ an eye of this world's light?
No: wan and sunk with midnight prayer
Are the pale looks of her I love;
Or if, at times, a light be there,
Its beam is kindled from above.

'I chose not her, my heart's elect,
From those who seek their Maker's shrine
In gems and garlands proudly decked,
As if themselves were things divine.
No: Heaven but faintly warms the breast
That beats beneath a broidered veil;
And she who comes in glittering ves