es, so artfully adapted to the
wearer's figure and complexion, as to raise such "creations" to the level
of a fine art.

An artist feels, he must fix on canvas that particular combination of
colors or that wonderful line of bust and hip. It is with a shudder that
he turns to the British matron, for she has probably, for this occasion,
draped herself in an "art material,"--principally "Liberty" silks of
dirty greens and blues (aesthetic shades!). He is tempted to cry out in
his disgust: "Oh, Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in
thy name!" It is one of the oddest things in the world that the English
should have elected to live so much in France, for there are probably
nowhere two peoples so diametrically opposed on every point, or who so
persistently and wilfully misunderstand each other, as the English and
the French.

It has been my fate to live a good deal on both sides of the Channel, and
nothing is more amusing than to hear the absurdities that are gravely
asserted by each of their neighbors. To a Briton, a Frenchman will
always be "either tiger or monkey" according to Voltaire; while to the
French mind English gravity is only hypocrisy to cover every vice.
Nothing pleases him so much as a great scandal in England; he will
gleefully bring you a paper containing the account of it, to prove how
true is his opinion. It is quite useless to explain to the British mind,
as I have often tried to do, that all Frenchmen do not pass their lives
drinking absinthe on the boulevards; and as Englishmen seem to leave
their morals in a valise at Dover when off for a visit to Paris, to be
picked up on their return, it is time lost to try to make a Gaul
understand what good husbands and fathers the sons of Albion are.

These two great nations seem to stand in the relation to each other that
Rome and Greece held. The English are the conquerors of the world, and
its great colonizers; with a vast capital in which wealth and misery
jostle each other on the streets; a hideous conglomeration of buildings
and monuments, without form and void, very much as old Rome must have
been under the Caesars, enormous buildings without taste, and enormous
wealth. The French have inherited the temperament of the Greeks. The
drama, painting, and sculpture are the preoccupation of the people. The
yearly exhibitions are, for a month before they open, the unique subject
of conversation in drawing-room or club. The state protects t