rotestations, that it is the fashion, and the only thing
remaining for her to do.

"There are, again, modes of dress in themselves very beautiful
and very striking, which are peculiarly adapted to theatrical
representation and to pictures, but the adoption of which as a
part of unprofessional toilet produces a sense of incongruity. A
mode of dress maybe in perfect taste on the stage, that would be
absurd in an evening party, absurd in the street, absurd, in
short, everywhere else.

"Now you come to my first objection to our present American
toilet,--its being to a very great extent _inappropriate_ to our
climate, to our habits of life and thought, and to the whole structure
of ideas on which our life is built. What we want, apparently, is some
court of inquiry and adaptation that shall pass judgment on the
fashions of other countries, and modify them to make them a graceful
expression of our own national character, and modes of thinking and
living. A certain class of women in Paris at this present hour makes
the fashions that rule the feminine world. They are women who live
only for the senses, with as utter and obvious disregard of any moral
or intellectual purpose to be answered in living as a paroquet or a
macaw. They have no family ties; love, in its pure domestic sense, is
an impossibility in their lot; religion in any sense is another
impossibility; and their whole intensity of existence, therefore, is
concentrated on the question of sensuous enjoyment, and that personal
adornment which is necessary to secure it. When the great ruling
country in the world of taste and fashion has fallen into such a state
that the virtual leaders of fashion are women of this character, it is
not to be supposed that the fashions emanating from them will be of a
kind well adapted to express the ideas, the thoughts, the state of
society, of a great Christian democracy such as ours ought to be.

"What is called, for example, the Pompadour style of dress, so much in
vogue of late, we can see to be perfectly adapted to the kind of
existence led by dissipated women whose life is one revel of
excitement; and who, never proposing to themselves any intellectual
employment or any domestic duty, can afford to spend three or four
hours every day under the hands of a waiting-maid, in alternately
tangling and untangling their hair. Powder, paint, gold-dust and
silver-dust, pomatums, cosmetics, are all perfectly appropriate where
the ideal of