d-dress in the world.

The prevailing tendency of the age is to avoid distinctions of dress
except in the value of the material, and then only between the two
great divisions of society--the affluent and the poor. Hence all
ornament seems to be a superfluity, except upon occasions of public
display or military service; and men will not now listen to any one
who advises them to put feathers and gold lace on their hats and caps:
they would as soon think of returning to the embroidered coats of
their grandfathers. The principle is a good one: in the palmy days of
Rome, the differences of dress bore no proportion to the differences
of station; distinction in dress was the failing of the middle ages, a
consequence of some lurking seeds of northern barbarism, which are
only now ceasing to be propagated. We seem, like the great men of the
Eternal City eighteen hundred years ago, to be looking more at the
inward worth and influence of a man, than at his outward state and
dress; and it is a good sign of the times; it is a reasonable
inclination of the mind; but it confines the exercise of taste in
dress. Men of the present day are determined to be plain about the
head as well as about the body; all ornament of head-dress they have
left to soldiers and to the fairer half of the creation:--_sed haec
hactenus_--we reserve our remarks on the _coiffures_ of these two
classes for another occasion.

H. L. J.

THE THREE GUARDSMEN.

Guardsmen have at all periods been a racketing, rollicking set of
fellows. Whether ancients or moderns, infidels or Christians,
praetorians or janissaries, the _mousquetaires_ and Scottish archers of
the French Louises, or the lifeguards of "bonnie Dundee's" own
regiment, they have always claimed, and usually enjoyed, a greater
degree of license than is accorded to the more unpretending soldiery
of the line. The first in the field, and the last out of it, they have
sometimes seemed to think that, by thrashing the king's enemies, they
acquired a right to baton his subjects, that captured cities atoned
for the wrongs of deluded damsels, and that each extra blow struck in
the fight, entitled them to an extra bottle in the barrack-room. On
duty, discipline--off duty, dissipation--seems to have been the motto
of these gentlemen; and if it be the case, that they occasionally
forgot the former part of their device, it, on the other hand, is no
where