ed and made
the wretched sisters a success.

In my youth it was the fashion to affect admiration for the Italian
school of painting and especially for the great masters of the
Renaissance. Whole families of perfectly inartistic English and
Americans might then he heard conscientiously admiring the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper (Botticelli had not been
invented then) in the choicest guide-book language.

When one considers the infinite knowledge of technique required to
understand the difficulties overcome by the giants of the Renaissance and
to appreciate the intrinsic qualities of their creations, one asks one's
self in wonder what our parents admired in those paintings, and what
tempted them to bring home and adorn their houses with such dreadful
copies of their favorites. For if they appreciated the originals they
never would have bought the copies, and if the copies pleased them, they
must have been incapable of enjoying the originals. Yet all these people
thought themselves perfectly sincere. To-day you will see the same thing
going on before the paintings of Claude Monet and Besnard, the same
admiration expressed by people who, you feel perfectly sure, do not
realize why these works of art are superior and can no more explain to
you why they think as they do than the sheep that follow each other
through a hole in a wall, can give a reason for their actions.

Dress and fashion in clothes are subjects above all others, where the
ineptitude of the human mind is most evident. Can it be explained in any
other way, why the fashions of yesterday always appear so hideous to
us,--almost grotesque? Take up an old album of photographs and glance
over the faded contents. Was there ever anything so absurd? Look at the
top hats men wore, and at the skirts of the women!

The mother of a family said to me the other day: "When I recall the way
in which girls were dressed in my youth, I wonder how any of us ever got
a husband."

Study a photograph of the Empress Eugenie, that supreme arbiter of
elegance and grace. Oh! those bunchy hooped skirts! That awful India
shawl pinned off the shoulders, and the bonnet perched on a roll of hair
in the nape of the neck! What were people thinking of at that time? Were
they lunatics to deform in this way the beautiful lines of the human body
which it should be the first object of toilet to enhance, or were they
only lacking in the artistic sense? Nothi