ity whose
senses are blunted, drugged, and deadened with dissipation and
ostentation, they reject the simpler forms of beauty, and seek for
startling effects, for odd and unexpected results. The contemplation
of one of our fashionable churches, at the hour when its fair
occupants pour forth, gives one a great deal of surprise. The toilets
there displayed might have been in good keeping among showy Parisian
women in an opera house, but even their original inventors would have
been shocked at the idea of carrying them into a church. The rawness
of our American mind as to the subject of propriety in dress is
nowhere more shown than in the fact that no apparent distinction is
made between church and opera house in the adaptation of attire. Very
estimable and we trust very religious young women sometimes enter the
house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of
the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem
almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with
hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner,
rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some
pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright
in front, she may look exceedingly pretty and piquant; and, if she
came there for a game of croquet or a tableau party, would be all in
very good taste; but as she comes to confess that she is a miserable
sinner, that she has done the things she ought not to have done, and
left undone the things she ought to have done,--as she takes upon her
lips most solemn and tremendous words, whose meaning runs far beyond
life into a sublime eternity,--there is a discrepancy which would be
ludicrous if it were not melancholy.

"One is apt to think, at first view, that St. Jerome was right in
saying,

"'She who comes in glittering vest
To mourn her frailty, still is frail.'

But St. Jerome was in the wrong, after all; for a flashy, unsuitable
attire in church is not always a mark of an undevout or entirely
worldly mind; it is simply a mark of a raw, uncultivated taste. In
Italy, the ecclesiastical law prescribing a uniform black dress for
the churches gives a sort of education to European ideas of propriety
in toilet, which prevents churches from being made theatres for the
same kind of display which is held to be in good taste at places of
public amusement. It is but justice to the inventors of Parisian
fashions to say t