has neither movement nor
supporting strength. In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot,
with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious
instability, the spring and balance that are so organic. But man should
no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of
piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid. Inexpressive
of what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they
are neither implicitly nor explicitly good raiment. It is hardly
possible to err by violence in denouncing them. Why, when an indifferent
writer is praised for "clothing his thought," it is to modern raiment
that one's agile fancy flies--fain of completing the metaphor!

The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other than
the mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the multiplication of
undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and meet, and
listen to the speaker. For the undistinguished are very important by
their numbers. These are they who make the look of the artificial world.
They are man generalized; as units they inevitably lack something of
interest; all the more they have cumulative effect. It would be well if
we could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in
the clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to be
changed. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their
national customs--and the wretchedest of them all the wearing of other
men's old raiment--that they must wait for reform until the reformed
dress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have turned second-
hand.

VICTORIAN CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a
certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim the
vulgarizing of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold
for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial,
"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," which were presumably considered good
comic reading in the "Punch" of that time, and to make acquaintance with
a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on
anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put
oneself at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat
the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if