mother's, her fine artistic taste and sense of fitness being intolerably
shocked by the violation of every propriety in a Juliet attired in a
modern white satin ball dress amid scenery representing the streets and
palaces of Verona in the fourteenth century, and all the other
characters dressed with some reference to the supposed place and period
of the tragedy. Visions too, no doubt, of sundry portraits of Raphael,
Titian, Giorgione, Bronzino,--beautiful alike in color and
fashion,--vexed her with suggestions, with which she plied my mother;
who, however, determined as I have said, thinking the body more than
raiment, and arguing that the unincumbered use of the person, and the
natural grace of young arms, neck, and head, and unimpeded movement of
the limbs (all which she thought more compatible with the simple white
satin dress than the picturesque mediaeval costume) were points of
paramount importance. My mother, though undoubtedly very anxious that I
should look well, was of course far more desirous that I should act
well, and judged that whatever rendered my dress most entirely
subservient to my acting, and least an object of preoccupation and
strange embarrassment to myself, was, under the circumstances of my
total inexperience and brief period of preparation, the thing to be
chosen, and I am sure that in the main she judged wisely. The mere
appendage of a train--three yards of white satin--following me wherever
I went, was to me a new, and would have been a difficult experience to
most girls. As it was, I never knew, after the first scene of the play,
what became of my train, and was greatly amused when Lady Dacre told me,
the next morning, that as soon as my troubles began I had snatched it up
and carried it on my arm, which I did quite unconsciously, because I
found something in the way of _Juliet's feet_.

I have often admired the consummate good sense with which, confronting a
whole array of authorities, historical, artistical, aesthetical, my
mother stoutly maintained in their despite that nothing was to be
adopted on the stage that was in itself ugly, ungraceful, or even
curiously antiquated and singular, however correct it might be with
reference to the particular period, or even to authoritative portraits
of individual characters of the play. The passions, sentiments, actions,
and sufferings of human beings, she argued, were the main concern of a
fine drama, not the clothes they wore. I think she even pr