pour forth, gives one a
great deal of surprise. The toilet 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
_piquante_; 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 veil
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, that,
had they ever had the smallest idea of going to church and Sunday
school, as our good girls do, they would immediately have devised
toilets appropriate to such exigencies. If it were any part of their
plan of life to appear statedly in public to confess themselves
'mis