hay, straw,
oats, butterflies, beads, birds, tinsel, streamers, jinglers, lace,
bugles, crape, which seem to be appointed to form a covering for the
female head, very often appear in combinations so singular, and the
results, taken in connection with all the rest of the costume, are such,
that we really think the people who usually assemble in a Quaker
meeting-house are, with their entire absence of ornament, more
becomingly attired than the majority of our public audiences. For if one
considers his own impression after having seen an assemblage of women
dressed in Quaker costume, he will find it to be, not of a confusion of
twinkling finery, but of many fair, sweet _faces_, of charming,
nice-looking _women_, and not of articles of dress. Now this shows that
the severe dress, after all, has better answered the true purpose of
dress, in setting forth the _woman_, than our modern costume, where the
woman is but one item in a flying mass of colors and forms, all of which
distract attention from the faces they are supposed to adorn. The dress
of the Philadelphian ladies has always been celebrated for its elegance
of effect, from the fact, probably, that the early Quaker parentage of
the city formed the eye and the taste of its women for uniform and
simple styles of color, and for purity and chastity of lines. The most
perfect toilets that have ever been achieved in America have probably
been those of the class familiarly called the gay Quakers,--children of
Quaker families, who, while abandoning the strict rules of the sect, yet
retain their modest and severe reticence, relying on richness of
material, and soft, harmonious coloring, rather than striking and
dazzling ornament.

"The next source of beauty in dress is the impression of truthfulness
and reality. It is a well-known principle of the fine arts, in all their
branches, that all shams and mere pretences are to be rejected,--a truth
which Ruskin has shown with the full lustre of his many-colored
prose-poetry. As stucco pretending to be marble, and graining pretending
to be wood, are in false taste in building, so false jewelry and cheap
fineries of every kind are in bad taste; so also is powder instead of
natural complexion, false hair instead of real, and flesh-painting of
every description. I have even the hardihood to think and assert, in the
presence of a generation whereof not one woman in twenty wears her own
hair, that the simple, short-cropped locks of Rosa B