The Clothes Mania

THAT Alpine hat which broke out upon us with so much violence last September, and which, I am told, has not yet spent its force in the interior States, is a good illustration of the way in which a fashion originates, “takes,” spreads, rages, declines, dies away in the distance, and is lost to view, until it pleases our sovereign lords, the fashion-makers, to spring it upon mankind again. The son of a New York hatter, late in the year 1867, while making the tour of Europe, found himself at Naples, where he noticed a pretty green hat that was much in vogue, called the Alpine hat. It was steeple-crowned, with wide brim, and a broad black ribbon round the crown which was further decorated by a feather. It differed from the familiar Tyrolese hat, which we often see at the opera upon the heads of picturesque banditti, chiefly in having the brim turned up, instead of down, and in having a deep, regular dent or cleft in the top of the crown, such as all soft hats have when they are first unpacked. The young hatter, though on pleasure bent, had a mind attentive to business, and he sent one of these hats home to his father, who placed it in his store for the amusement of his customers. It was as though he had said : “ See what things those absurd foreigners wear! Yes, sir, they actually wear that kind of thing in Naples ; out of doors, and in broad daylight ! Just fancy a man wearing a green hat with a feather in it, in the streets !”

For three months or more this hat, so pretty at Naples, so ridiculous in New York, was exhibited in the hat store in Broadway without exciting in the breast of any man a desire to possess it. The realistic drama was then in fashion. Managers advertised their new effects as patented; dramatists sought the twofold protection of the Patent Office and the copyright law, and would not permit the hero of another man’s play to incur any but an original peril. The hats worn upon the stage being thus as real as the real water of the stage fountain, and the real donkey of the stage cart, this romantic hat was not in request for the drama. Indeed, it remains unsold at the present moment, and may still be inspected by the curious. But one day it occurred to the philosophic mind of the hatter who owned it, that, apart from its green color and its feather, the fundamental ideas of this hat were good, and were also in harmony with the tastes of the American people. He thought he saw In it a taking compromise between the orthodox respectability of the stiff and glossy cylinder, and the too careless lowering loaferism of soft felt. He thought he could Americanize the Naples hat in such a way as to combine the safety of the stovepipe with the grace that is latent in the slouch. Then he said, “ Make me a dozen hats of that pattern, but black and without a feather.” In due time, the hats were placed in the store for sale. The hit they made was immediate and most decided. Every one who saw them was delighted with them, and they were all sold in a few hours. It is a long time since hatters have offered the public so pleasing a union of the becoming, the comfortable, and the convenient. And about this time arrived in New York the gallant band of English cricketers, wearing hats somewhat similar; and these gentlemen, performing daily in the presence of a great multitude, gave an impetus to the fashion. In a short time, the originator was selling a hundred Alpine hats a day, and all the other hatters were in full cry after them. In a few weeks, one half the better dressed men in New York were happy in the consciousness of having their heads more becomingly covered than they ever were before ; and the other half secretly craved the same happiness, but were prevented from indulging their desire by the noble dread of wearing a hat that “ everybody ” wore.

In this little story of the Alpine hat is contained, as I have said, all the principles that control the rise, spread, and extinction of fashions. But in order to present the subject properly, we must go back of the Alpine hat, and see by what steps we arrived at the state of mind and taste which caused so many of us to adopt it so eagerly. And this is a subject which goes down to the depths of human nature. As the topmost leaves of the tallest tree draw their nourishment from the far distant and unseen root, and take their form, color, and texture from the tree’s constitution and circumstances ; as there is a natural necessity that the leaves of the willow shall be long and the leaves of the holly shall shine ; so the feathers in ladies’ bonnets and the shape of men’s hats, and all the seeming caprices of fashion, are controlled by law, originate in the nature of things, and are influenced by the controlling events of history. I do not know why walking-sticks are seldom carried at present in our streets, where, three years ago it was common to carry them ; but if any one had a month in which to find out, he could find out ; and very likely his investigation would carry him up among the great events and men of the age. He might have to write to Count Bismarck about it; the national debt may have something to do with it. The shade of care that comes over the countenances of a community when times are hard, and which our faces have worn for the last three years, since our burden began to settle down heavily upon us (the flush-money of the war being all spent, and the fictitious prosperity of war having been succeeded by its proper reaction), may explain it; for a walking-stick is the natural accompaniment of a mind at ease. It is when we go forth to stroll among the girls in the Fifth Avenue on a fine afternoon, that we take a cane with us ; not when we are going down town to collect or borrow money. But I leave this interesting branch of the subject to future investigators, and return to my hats, merely reporting, for the information of those investigators, that, during the whole of the year 1868, the walking-stick trade was exceedingly dull, and that in 1864 and 1865 it was very brisk indeed.

Among the pictures in the gallery of the New York Historical Society, there is one representing the interior of the Park Theatre, on an evening in 1822, during the performance of the elder Matthews. Every face in the audience is a portrait, the object of the artist being to assemble upon one canvas portraits of all the leading persons then moving in the society and business of New York. Often as I go into this interesting gallery, I never fail to take a look, in passing, at the round-faced, burly fathers of the present kings of commerce and finance. What a contrast, their amplitude of countenance and form, their good-humored torpidity of intellect, their consummate, solid respectability, with the sharper-featured, more slender, slightly intellectualized “ operators ” of the present time ; connoisseurs in tandems, pictures, books, operas! As the persons in that distinguished audience are in full dress, the picture serves as an historical fashion-plate. The greater number of those stout gentlemen wear the most voluminous white neckcloths, which seem to have been wound round and round their necks, completely filling up the space between the coat and the countenance. Others have on those high stiff stocks which many of us remember,—things of buckram covered with black silk, satin, or velvet, fastened behind with a buckle that was not always invisible. From out the depths of the stocks, stiff and sharp-cornered collars thrust themselves toward heaven. The coat-collars of these solid gentlemen are several inches high, and only less stiff than a pine board. A few of the spectators, who are standing at the back of the pit, have their hats on, and those hats are immense ; they are structures, regularly built, bell-crowned, and covered with the beaver skins which Mr. Astor brought from the far-distant haunts of his trappers. Most of the ladies wear bonnets, which also are vast, wide-spreading, and lofty, apparently of construction scarcely less massive than the beavers of their husbands.

Stiff and cumbrous as the clothes in this picture seem to us, they are light and easy compared with the cocked hats, the padded coats, stiffened with buckram, the wigs, the overflowing ruffles, the knee-breeches and great buckles, from which victorious democracy, in Jefferson’s early day, delivered the fathers of these fathers who sit so solemnly enjoying Charles Matthews the elder. Old men used to be about New York who remembered when the young dandies of the Democratic party, in 1801, — the year of Mr. Jefferson’s inauguration, — first dared to show themselves in Broadway without wig or pigtail. It was thought to be an innovation scarcely decent for a young man to go about the streets exhibiting his own hair ; and many men surrendered the pigtail only with life. When Mr. Jefferson discarded his short breeches, silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, and concealed his well-formed legs in pantaloons, the Federalists were prone to regard it as the trick of a demagogue to secure the favor of the mob. A gentleman in trousers and short hair ! But what better could be expected of a Democrat and an atheist ?

After the revolutionary ferment, which in Europe ended in defeat under Napoleon, and here in peaceful victory under Jefferson, there was a reaction toward the opinions which are called conservative, and this reaction expressed itself in stiffness and uniformity of dress. People forty years of age can remember the high stock, the cruel shirt-collar, the ruthless coat-collar, the prodigious bonnet, and the general setness and severity of costume which prevailed among us, before Channing, Dickens, Carlyle, Emerson, Beecher, and the New York Tribune had begun the emancipation of the American understanding from the tight-fitting armor of opinions in which it was once confined. The primness and stiffness of the ladies who used to walk past the Astor House when it was the one grand hotel of the city, and when the fashionable walk was between the Battery and St. Paul’s Church, can only be realized by those who remember their leg-of-mutton sleeves bulged out with buckram, and their lace handkerchiefs carried in their hands before them in a ludicrously precise and uniform way. The dress of the men was only less formal, cumbrous, and unyielding. Over all hung heavily the large black beaver hat; which maintained its supremacy so long because it harmonized with the stiffness and angularity of the rest of the attire.

It required three great historical events merely to circumscribe the dominion of the stove-pipe hat. First, the Mexican War revealed to a large number of American citizens the unsuspected truth, that the head of man could be covered becomingly without resorting to the stiff beaver. A good many officers and soldiers brought home from Mexico the wide-brimmed, steeple-crowned, flexible hat worn by Spaniards and Spanish creoles ; but the large and sweeping picturesqueness of that tropical production was felt to be incongruous with the square-shouldered, tight-fitting garments worn by the busy and punctual men of American cities. Few had the courage to face a staring population, and most of those spacious hats were hung on pegs as mementos of warlike adventure. Then occurred the discovery of gold in California, and the wonderful rush across the Plains, around Cape Horn, and over the Isthmus, which compelled thousands of people to discard from their attire everything that was not pliable. The Mexican soft hat, modified to suit the American taste, became part of the uniform of the goldseeking multitude, and was frequently seen in the streets of the Atlantic cities. But neither the war with Mexico, nor the discovery of California gold, nor both these important events together, sufficed to make the soft hat fashionable. Something more was needed. Europe had to be convulsed, and half a dozen ancient thrones shaken, before the scene became possible which gave a rival to the stiff cylinder.

The Mexican War began in 1846. Captain Sutter’s men discovered the glittering particles of gold in the California mill race, in 1848. On a certain day in December, 1851 (the soft hat manufacture being then in full activity), the most picturesque human figure which recent America has had the pleasure of beholding flashed upon two hundred thousand of us as we stood packed in Broadway, between the Battery and Union Square,—two miles and two thirds of excited people, every creature of whom desired in His. secret soul to be a pleasing object of contemplation to his friends and the public. We saw the hero of the hour but for half a minute each, as he passed, standing in his barouche, his pale and handsome face set off so strikingly by that graceful hat, with the large black feather wound about it. What a beautiful object he was ! The mere beauty of the man and his costume was such as to excite in every susceptible beholder a thrill of delight, I can see him now, the splendid Magyar, the magnificent, marvellous, histrionic Kossuth !

It was done! The stove-pipe had a rival; the feather, of course, was a thing to which we could not lift our souls. It has pleased Heaven so to constitute these northern climes, and the races inhabiting them, that a male of our species, who wears a feather in his hat of his own free will, must be either more or less than man. We could not attain to the feather; but the KOSSUTH HAT, adapted to the American taste, immediately appeared, and from that day to this, the stiff cylinder has never been able to reign over us with its former absolute sway.

An unpopular article of attire is the hat stigmatized as the stove-pipe. It is generally reviled as the acme of inconvenience and ugliness. It binds the head, and reddens the skin ; it is heavy, large, inflexible, expensive, easily injured, difficult to restore, and very much in the way on a journey, in a crowd, or at a public meeting. No one pretends to admire or defend it. And yet there is something in the breast of the respectable citizen which prompts him, upon the whole, to prefer it; and, consequently, that hat, to this hour, is worn by about one half of the men in cities and large towns. There is, besides, a tendency in men, after indulging in soft infidelities for a while, to return to this unyielding head-covering. If between the sublime and the ridiculous there is a whole step, there is only a finger’s breadth between the becoming and the absurd; and a staid citizen, when he ventures upon a soft hat, is not quite sure on which side of that dividing finger he is. But the stiff hat is a fixed quantity; he feels safe in it; and he is content not to be picturesque so long as he is sure not to be ridiculous. In itself, the hard hat is unpleasing and irrational, but it harmonizes with the angularity and stiffness which solid men still affect in the rest of their attire. Hence in Boston and Philadelphia, it is more frequently seen than in New York. The time has been in those two cities when the credit of a young man would have suffered if he had walked to his business in any other kind of hat than one of that polished and unyielding description which was once associated in the public mind with punctuality in meeting pecuniary obligations. If his hat was flexible, what guaranty had the public for the rigidity of his principles ?

The Alpine hat took half our heads by storm, because it held out to us the alluring prospect of being safely picturesque. The dent in the crown was regular ; the brim was somewhat broad, but it was not allowed to flap about of its own free will; and that wide black ribbon round the crown gave richness and dignity to the whole. In truth, the soft hat was arranged in its most becoming form, and then fixed in that form by block and stiffening. Such was its success in reconciling discordant conditions, that I saw the president of one bank and the cashier of another going down town wearing the Alpine hat, at a time when it was in high favor with the easy-going gentlemen of the press. Every one must feel that this savors of the millennium; the Alpine hat, indeed, expresses clearly the spiritual condition of the age, that halffledged freedom of the soul, that longing to be free, without quite daring to launch away from the native twig, which is characteristic of so many at present.

In most of our large libraries there are collections of costume-books sufficient to show how immediately a change of opinion reveals itself in costume; and many modern historians have recorded the fact. Henri Martin, in his History of France, frequently pauses to note the connection between changes of spiritual condition and changes in the general style of dress. “ In order to judge of a community,” he says in one place (Martin, XII. 124), “it almost suffices to see its costume, that faithful interpreter of the bodily habits, which reflects always those of the spirit.” Handling masses of illustrated works, and living near galleries of old pictures, he observed that both the morals and the minds of his countrymen have been faithfully reflected in the clothes they preferred. Under Francis I., French fashions were elegant and voluptuous ; at the immoral court of Henry III., they were extravagant and monstrous ; in the time of Henry IV., they had a military cast ; under glorious Richelieu, the costumes assumed “ a nobleness, a severe and picturesque amplitude, a style at once graceful and distinguished, never equalled in modern Europe.” Fashions in that age, as in every age, originated in the country where there was most money and most leisure to spend upon dress, which then was Holland. Venice once gave the law to fashionable Europe, then Spain, then Holland, then France. While Louis XIV. was a gay and gorgeous personage, the costumes of his court were gay and gorgeous, but when he had been scared into a kind of repentance, and settled down with Madame de Maintenon into the steady-going married man, and no one could hope for royal favor who did not attend mass once a day, costumes became heavy, ugly, awkward, a monstrous blending of the courtly and the puritanic. Then, when the Regent brought pleasure into fashion once more, instantly the cumbrous extravagances of the old court were abandoned, and dress became simpler, costlier, and more elegant. As the Revolution approached, democratic ideas were fashionable in chateaus and grand drawing-rooms. All costume and all decoration became simpler and less expensive. English modes were introduced, the splendid carriages with panels painted by artists of repute, and heavy with elaborate decoration, all disappeared, and Paris was sombre with chariots, darkcolored and devoid of ornamentation, in the London style. Later, meanness and shabbiness of attire were the height of the mode in Paris, where republicans of ancient lineage and renown strove to express in this way their newly felt brotherhood to the less fortunate of mankind. Under Napoleon, all fashions for men had something in them of a military character, Napoleon reserving to himself the striking simplicity of a field uniform.

We have all observed, I suppose, what Mr. Herbert Spencer mentions in one of his essays, that the character of a political meeting can be inferred from the dress of those who attend it. “At a chartist demonstration,” he tells us, “ a lecture on socialism, or a soirée of the friends of Italy, there will be seen many among the audience, and a still larger ratio among the speakers, who get themselves up in a style more or less unusual. . . . . Bare necks, shirt-collars à la Byron, wonderfully shaggy great-coats, numerous oddities in form and color, destroy the monotony usual in crowds. . . . . And when the gathering breaks up, the varieties of head-gear, the number of caps, and the abundance of felt hats, suffice to prove that were the world at large like-minded, the black cylinders which tyrannize over us would soon be deposed.” These remarks apply as well to New York as to London. They perfectly describe the motley assemblies which used to crowd the old Tabernacle in Broadway, when Theodore Parker lectured to all that was most advanced and enlightened, as well as to much that was eccentric and affected, in the city. On the other hand, how uniform and precise the dress of the men who issue in dark clouds about 12.15 on Sundays, from churches where all endeavor to think alike, and engage an able man, at great expense, to assist them in so doing! In those Theodore Parker days, members of the press sported various peculiarities of costume ; especially men connected with the journal supposed to be most at variance with public opinion. Since that time, extremes of opinion have drawn nearer together, and we now observe that the public-spirited and exemplary workingmen of the New York press, Bohemians of the new school, only discard so much of the conventional in costume and demeanor as is inconvenient and irrational. Compared with people of twenty years ago, we are all radicals, and our clothes show it. The eccentrics of the old Tabernacle platform have generally chosen to conform to the fashions of a public with which they are no longer much at variance; and the public, less trammelled than formerly by orthodoxies in polities and theology, dress more easily, comfortably, and variously.

Certainly, men do. If any one thinks ladies do not, I would like to show him a set of fashion-plates of 1820 to 1830, now lying before me. Paniers, do you say? Paniers first came in, I believe, about six months after the marriage of Louis XV., which occurred in 1725. They have been in fashion several times since, but they have never been so light, so modest, so harmless, so little worn, and so generally ridiculed as now. We can at least boast that they are not now regarded as an affair of state, disturbing the peace of courts, and calling for the interference of a prime minister. That gossiping Paris lawyer, Barbier, in his diary for 1728, has a curious passage relating to the paniers then worn at the French court, a passage which may console some readers whom the sight of a panier causes to despair of the human race.

“One would not believe,”says Barbier, “that the Cardinal [Fleury, prime minister] has been embarrassed with regard to the paniers which women wear under their petticoats to render them large and spreading. They are of such a size, that when the ladies sit down, the whalebones are pushed out and make such an astonishing spread that they have been obliged to have arm-chairs made on purpose. Only three women can get into a box at the theatre without crowding. The fashion has gone to such an extravagance, as extreme fashions always do, that when the princesses are seated on each side of the queen, their petticoats, which rise as they seat themselves, hide the queen’s petticoat. That seemed improper, but it was difficult to devise a remedy. By dint of pondering (à force de rêver) the Cardinal has decided that there shall always be an empty chair on each side of the queen, which will prevent the inconvenience; and the pretext is, that those two chairs are reserved for Mesdames de France, her daughters ” (twins, two years old).

Thus the wise old priest, who governed France for so many years, arranged this great affair. It soon appeared, however, that the princesses did not like their petticoats concealed by the paniers of adjacent duchesses, and the Cardinal was obliged to grant them a vacant stool on each side. This offended the duchesses, who desired the same privilege. But Cardinal Fleury, like Dickens’s immortal London barber, had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it so as to exclude the duchesses, which led to a bitter war of pamphlets and epigrams, in the course of which one pamphlet was publicly burned by the executioner (Barbier, II. 37 and 41). Much as we may regret to see young loveliness disfiguring itself with these things in the Fifth Avenue, we can find comfort in the reflection that Mr. Seward has not been obliged to interfere, nor has the public hangman earned the smallest fee in consequence of the revived fashion.

Fashion is a necessity of human nature ; because, while we all desire to be pleasingly attired, not one in ten thousand of us is able to invent any article of dress or decoration that shall be truly becoming. Nothing is more universal than the wish to be well-looking ; and the feeling is so strong that a person had almost better not be born at all than be born two feet too tall or too short, or with any other very marked personal peculiarity that cannot be concealed. Byron’s morbidness with regard to his lameness was not an unusual case. Turn loose, in a large school of rougn boys or girls, a child who has a squint eye, or a humpback, or a red patch on its face, or who is extremely fat or lean, or tall or short, or whose clothes are very different from those worn by the rest, or who has some unconquerable peculiarity of speech or manner, and that child will suffer an acute misery of which no one can form an idea who has never experienced it. Nor is this a peculiarity of childhood. What would induce a respectable citizen of Boston to walk down Washington Street in top-boots, or wearing a hat of 1830 ? Where is the woman strong-minded enough to calmly endure the stony stare of an omnibus full of female critics who have spied out something awry or antique in her costume ? It is a tremendous ordeal. We are so constituted that we like to be like one another ; and so general is this desire, that one of the signs of madness is an inclination to oddity in personal adornment. It is hard for us to believe in the soundness of a person’s judgment who turns his collar down when every one else turns it up, or who lets his hair grow very long when the rest of mankind have theirs cropped. It is only in these advanced days, and in these two or three most advanced nations, that there is any real liberty of choice whether we shall go bearded or shorn, and whether we shall take evening sustenance in a coat with a tail behind, or in one with a tail all around it. Indeed, there are circles even in metropolitan London, Paris, and New York, where a person, otherwise unexceptionable, would be grossly undervalued if he should presume to present himself in any other than the regulation coat.

Many suppose that it is only the circles dependent upon Paris tor their personal decoration, which are subject to these rigors. Not so. Nothing delivers from the tyranny of fashion but real elevation and independence of character; and, accordingly, the most abject slaves of fashion are to be found among the barbarous races and classes. Mr. Oscanyan tells us, that in the harems of the East, where Paris fashions are unknown, the changes in the shape of the ladies’ dresses, and in the mode of adorning their persons, are as frequent as with us ; and, although those changes are often so trifling that a foreigner would not notice them, a lady who cannot follow the new mode is as miserable as a New York servant-girl would have been a year or two ago without a hoop-skirt. We read in Marco Polo that it was so with the ladies of the harem countries, six hundred years ago. “ A peculiar fashion of dress,” he records of one of those countries, “prevails among the women of the superior class, who wear below their waists, in the manner of drawers, a kind of garment in the making of which they employ, according to their means, a hundred, eighty, or sixty ells of line cotton cloth ; which also they gather or plait, in order to increase the apparent size of their hips ; those being accounted the most handsome who are most bulky in that part.” Paniers again! And when the captains who sailed under Prince Henry the Navigator, first landed upon the Western coast of Africa, years before Columbus commanded a ship, they discovered that the unclad beauties of Guinea were devoured by the same passion to be in the mode. “ That woman among them,” writes an old translator of the valiant and talkative Cadamosto, “ who has the largest breasts, has the glory of being considered the most handsome. For this purpose, each female, ambitious of this prerogative, when they attain their seventeenth or eighteenth year submit themselves to the operation of having their breasts tied around with strings, and so closely drawn, that they almost sever them from the body, and by means of daily efforts of stretching and dilation, give them at length such an extension, as to hang down to the navel. No greater bliss can arrive to their sex than success in this attempt.”¹

And a traveller of to-day tells us that he carried with him a bountiful supply of the prettiest and costliest colored beads into the interior of Africa, hoping thereby to conciliate a powerful tribe and purchase their good offices ; but when he arrived among them, he found, to his dismay, that the fashion in beads had changed, and that his were not in vogue. Colored beads were out, white beads were in. Not a negro of them, nor a negress, would look at his beautiful assortment of brilliant-hued beads, the choicest product of Birmingham ; but the rage was for a certain kind of very cheap and common white beads, which the traders had introduced. Give me a week in the Astor Library, and I will furnish an octavo volume of facts like these, showing that the desire to be in the mode is universal, and that this desire is strongest in the weakest of our species.

The root of it all is, the deep and poignant shame which we experience from physical defects, — a feeling most necessary and salutary. Every man wishes to be of the proper number of inches round the chest, and every woman wishes to be beautiful in form and feature. There is not a fashion now prevalent in the world, and probably never has been one, which did not originate in the desire on the part of some one to display a physical excellence, or conceal a physical defect. Nature abhors bodily insufficiency. For five years past, men have stood aghast at the fantastic tricks which ladies have played before high Heaven with, their own and other people’s hair, as well as with that of horses and other innocent creatures. This wondrous hair system, which has prevailed throughout Christendom, all originated in the fact that the hair of a certain conspicuous woman became, by incessant dressings, very thin. Those shoes, too, which have the heel near the middle of the foot, and destroy the harmony of every movement, owe their currency to a foolish and groundless superstition, that a small foot is a sign of superior lineage. Some lady whose position required her to wear fine clothes in the gaze of many of her fellow-mortals had a large foot, which her obliging shoemaker strove to diminish by putting the heel an inch or two nearer the toe than it ought to have been. The trick seemed to answer the purpose, and from that time every lady in six nations, not exceptionally firm and sensible, has gone rocking on a pivot. Constantly, for the last three hundred years, ladies have been preached at for wearing their dresses too low ; but such is the passion of human beings for displaying physical excellence, that just as often as the conspicuous lady of the age is well formed the fashion returns, and women indulge their desire to appear as lovely as nature made them.

In every community of which we have any knowledge, there is that one conspicuous person or class whom the rest admire, envy, and imitate. But this elect few, who alone have much time or means to expend upon the decoration of the body, are ever striving to be as distinguished in appearance as they suppose themselves to be in reality; and thus there is always going on a game of cross-purposes between the few and the many. The young men of New York who give their whole mind, such as it is, to the adornment and display of their persons, were glad enough to wear Alpine hats while only their own circle had them ; but the moment those hats began to be generally worn, the dandies gave theirs away, and fell back upon styles which had some little peculiarity. The Astrakhan cap, high, and without a visor, gave solace to some, and caused the lobby of the French Opera to assume an Alaskian aspect, as though the Russians on their way home had stopped a few nights in New York to see the new piece. If the dandies succeed in adopting a kind of hat that pleases the public, more and more of the Alpines are laid aside, until they finally disappear beyond the Alleghanies, and spread themselves over the Valley of the Mississippi. Thus it is with all fashions. They are invented by taste or suggested by accident ; they are adopted by the few who live but to dress ; they are taken up by the public who have only time to ask what is worn ; they are then abandoned by the ornamental class, and successively by the classes who are uneasy if they do not resemble them ; and, at last, they are only seen on the persons of the multitude, who buy clothes with the intention of wearing them out, and who execute that intention.

Several causes have conspired of late years to stimulate our natural and commendable love of personal decoration, until most of us expend too much money upon it, and many are possessed by a kind of mania for changing and multiplying their garments, and for having them made of materials needlessly expensive.

Eighteen years ago, the President of the Republic of France betrayed the country which had trusted him, stole its liberties in the night, laid robber hands upon its treasury, dishonored its noblest citizens by carting them to jail in prison vans, murdered in cold blood several hundreds of innocent men and women in the streets of Paris, and transported hundreds more to a hot unhealthy region of the tropics. This was the Andersonville of usurpation. It transcended all that had ever been done in that kind,—joining to the extreme of dastardly meanness the extreme of audacious cruelty, and being totally devoid of palliation or excuse, except that invented by the head liar of the gang who perpetrated it. The man in whose name the deed was done appears to have furnished nothing but the lies ; the audacity, and what little courage was shown, being supplied by others. Mr. Kinglake’s chapter upon this usurpation (Invasion of the Crimea, Vol. I. Ch. XIV) strikingly confirmed by some American narratives to which that author had not access, exhausts the subject, and avenges the human race, which is deeply injured whenever man’s faith in man is lessened by the deliberate betrayal of a solemnly accepted trust. Mr. Kinglake, I say, has avenged our outraged race ; for which, I trust, we are all duly grateful to him. Nothing remains butfor France to bring the perfidious wretch to trial for the special wrong done to her, and execute upon him the penalty to which he may be condemned.

As usual in such cases, a woman was found willing to share the bed and booty of the successful robber. She was young, beautiful, well formed, and of just such a mind as to submit joyfully to spend half the day in trying on articles of wearing apparel, and the other half in displaying them to a concourse of people. It became, too, and remains an important part of her duty to amuse, dazzle, and debase the women of France, by wearing a rapid succession of the most gorgeous, novel, bewildering costumes, the mere description of which has developed a branch of literature, employs many able writers, and mainly supports fifty periodicals. Here is a vain, beautiful woman, living in the gaze of nations, who has the plunder of a rich kingdom with which to buy her clothes, and the taste of a continent to devise them for her; for to Paris the élite of all tailors, dress-makers, milliners, and hair-dressers go from every capital in Europe. Whatever there is in France of truly noble and patriotic — and there are as many noble and patriotic persons in France as in any country — avoids the vicinity of this woman ; while around her naturally gather the thoughtless and the interested. The women in this circle imitate her as closely as women can whose husbands have not stolen the treasures of a nation; all except one, it is said, and she is the real queen of fashion.

Both these leading women have certain physical defects which they wish to conceal, as well as certain unusual charms, of which they intend the most shall be made. One is beautiful and tall. The other is ugly and short, but graceful, vivacious, and interesting. The hair of one of them growing scanty behind, all women felt the necessity of carrying a pound of horsehair under their own, and swelled out in the region of the back hair to an extent that now seems incredible. If the parting of the hair widens, and begins to resemble baldness, then frizzing comes in, which covers up the deficiency. A few gray hairs bring powder into fashion. Other insufficiencies send paniers on their way round the world. For these women, and especially the one who figures in the centre of the group, occupy that conspicuous place to which for two centuries past more female eyes have been admiringly directed than to any other; and there reside near them a band of writers who live by chronicling every new device of decoration that appears upon their persons. So able, liberal, and sensible a journal as the Pall Mall Gazette finds it necessary to station an industrious member of its staff within sight of these people, for the sole purpose of telling the best women in England what clothes the worst Women in France wear. I should suppose, from looking over the periodicals which publish fashion news, that there must be in Paris as many as a hundred writers who derive the whole or part of their income from describing the dresses worn in the ancient palaces temporarily occupied by the usurper and his dependants ; and many of these writers do their work so well, that their letters are a most potent stimulator of the passion for dress which is so easily kindled in the minds of the ignorant and immature.

This poor woman, who is the immediate cause of the mischief, is, we are told, an anxious and unhappy being, as well she may be. She struggles to conciliate. A forced, fixed smile is ever upon her face, when that face is seen by others. In her growing anxiety, she naturally redoubles her efforts to dazzle and beguile the people in whose sight she dwells, and on whose money she dresses. When the Hour comes, I hope she will be mercifully judged, for she has already expiated the venial sin of yielding to a temptation which only a very superior woman—one really honest and thorough-bred — could have resisted. It is probable that she now regards the wearing of those tremendous costumes merely as her contribution towards housekeeping ; as though she said to her husband, “ You keep down the men by muzzling the press and flattering the army, and I ’ll fool the women by wearing the most stunning costumes that ever struck envy to the female heart.”

Then the marriage laws of France, and the universal custom of demanding a dowry with a wife, have necessitated other arrangements than marriage between the sexes ; have called into existence a large class of women who are well named the demi-monde, — a something between respectable married women and those who are wholly out of the pale of respectability. I presume this class is not more numerous in proportion to the rest of the population now than they were when the loyal Barbier, indignant at the epigrams launched at Louis XV. when he established his first mistress at court, exclaimed : “Everyone else keeps a mistress ; why should n’t the king have one ? ” The demi-monde may not be proportionally more numerous than in the year 1735, but they have, as a class, a hundred times more money to spend. Empty head, vacant time, full purse, — these are the main constituents of the people subject to the clothes mania. Since the discovery of gold in California in 1848, I suppose more people have undergone a complete change of circumstances than ever before in so short a space of time. From that heavily laden marquis in England, who toils at the management of an estate yielding an income of three thousand pounds sterling a day, to the rag-pickers of the streets, we all have more money to spend than we used to have; and one of the things we are surest to do, when we have some superfluous cash, is to go to Paris and buy pleasure with it,— pleasure being a chief product of that capital. Of course, there must be a prodigious number of semi and wholly unfortunate women there who have heaps of gold, and nothing to do but to copy or burlesque the showy women of the Tuileries.

Heavens ! What a carnival of folly they are holding,—those women of the palace and of the demi-monde ! That is, if we may believe our assiduous friends, the reporters of fashions. The most curious and amusing feature of it is, the great number of things that are now regulated by fashion. I read in one fashion-letter that American young ladies were greatly in vogue in Paris until last year; but during the present season it has not been fashionable to have them at balls and parties, because it has been discovered that, under elegant and most costly costumes, some of them concealed an ignorance surpassing that of a servant-girl. I read in another of these epistles, that such is the rage for light hair, that ladies whose hair is not of the fashionable hue tie it up into the smallest possible space, and wholly cover it with light curls, frizzles, and powder. Another informs us that the costumes of the Conspicuous Woman of France, which are sometimes changed four times a day, and the most expensive of which are never worn more than twice, vary in sentiment with the occasion ; so that when she attends a council of ministers, so called, she wears a dress of “ a grave, reflecting tone, on which hues of steelgray meet rays of studious brown, the ensemble being burnished armor.” Two years ago. we are further assured, it was fashionable to be seen making caps and dresses for some poor woman’s baby ; but babies are past, and now no lady of fashion does anything with needles less elegant than “Venetian guipure or netting,” whatever that may be. Mourning dresses and mourning customs, it seems, also vary, and we are favored with minute descriptions of the styles worn at Père-la-Chaise on the day when custom enjoins that graves shall be visited. Coffins, we are told, are again covered with black cloth “puffed like upholstery.”

Indeed, if the reader will take the trouble to look over a few of the fashion-letters from Paris, he will discover that fashion now prescribes not only every article of dress and personal decoration, but that there is scarcely anything which it does not regulate. In the course of a week or two I have gathered paragraphs telling me what cards I must use for every occasion on which cards can be supposed to come into play ; how I must be buried, if I wish to have the thing done as it should be ; what styles of tombstone are now in fashion; what color my horses would have to be, if I had any; whether the wheels and the body of my carriage must contrast or match ; what medicines, and school of medicine, and practitioners of medicine, it is fashionable to employ, as well as what diseases are now in vogue. I am notified, also, that in England, at present, the fashionable religion is Ritualism. Strangest of all, I am seriously assured by the Moniteur de la Mode itself, that it is now the height of fashion, not to follow the fashion, but to go to the studio of your artiste in clothes, and demand of her a creation, — a costume wholly original. “ There is no woman of fashion who does not ask des confections faites exclusivement pour elle. As soon as a thing has been seen, she wishes it no longer.” This calls to mind the advice which the author of Pelham gave to the London dandy of thirty years ago, which was, that if he saw his most favorite, most costly, most stunning waistcoat copied by another man, he should instantly give his own away to his valet. No other course was open to a man of true ton.

The solemnity with which these things are stated is sometimes extremely ludicrous. The force of the comic can no further go than in a paragraph printed last winter in a New York paper, which notified the public that a family was in affliction from a cause both novel and distressing. An elegant bridal veil of "real point lace” had been ordered in Paris for a young lady who was to be married the next day. It had not arrived, and “the family of the bride were very much concerned, fearing that white tulle would have to be substituted.” Carlyle should have had this for “ Sartor Resartus.” “ Concerned ” is good.

The truth is, that the two conspicuous persons in France are in a position which is both false and precarious. Being essentially histrionic persons, they employ histrionic arts, one of which is, rapid and frequent changes of costume. One of these people plays emperor, and the other plays empress ; and they have set all the fools in Christendom dressing for parts. “ A remarkable toilet,” says a fashion-letter, “is a hunting-robe, to be worn by a belle, who looks on while the hunters mount in their saddles, but does not follow them.”

The cost of all this is beyond arithmetic to compute. Never before were the treasures of a frugal and laborious people, such as the French are, wasted so wantonly. No mistress of Louis XIV., no titled harlot of the Regency, not Pompadour, not Dubarry, ever squandered the money of the French with such reckless profusion as the woman now occupying the apartments in which they dwelt. “ The cream of novelty,” says a late letter from Paris, “ is a garland so contrived that, as the heat of the dancing-room becomes greater, the petals composing this garland open gradually, then fall into the hair, disclosing a diamond or a ruby in each.” Another : “ A new fashion is, to have buttons and jewelry of the same shade as the ribbon sashes ; thus a maize taffeta is worn with amethyst, and coral jewelry with coral-colored ribbons.” Another: “The ladies at Compiègne dress four times a day, and vie with one another in magnificence.” “ The Empress’s toilets are all ravishing. On Sunday, at mass, she wore a blue satin trained dress, trimmed with Russian sable, with a polonaise of the same, likewise trimmed with sable, and a bonnet of iris velvet with aigrette.” This was a simple church dress. One of the evening costumes was “ an apricot silk, puffed all round the bottom with apricot tulle ; flounces worked with silver, fuchsia pattern, and trimmed with Venetian fringe of white silk. Over this an immense train of white satin, softened by apricot tulle, worked with silver fuchsias and fringe round the borders.”

In this style do women of a certain mind dress when they have the plunder of a great kingdom at command. The Princess Metternich, when she came to spend a few days at Compiègne, felt it necessary to bring with her twenty-six trunks full of clothes ; and we read of a French bride who had sixty thousand francs’ worth of handkerchiefs as one item of her outfit. In a word, the surplus money which ought to be educating France is at present chiefly wasted in disfiguring a few thousand Frenchwomen.

The time was when the ladies who led society in France had other claims to the homage of men than the clothes they wore. The time was, do I say ? The time is. The women who dress with this shameless disregard of morality and taste are, in no proper sense, leaders of the society of the country upon which they have fastened. They are not the successors of those amiable, intelligent ladies to whom Martin refers, when he says : “ The ancients created conversation between men. Conversation between the two sexes, the true and complete conversation, was born in France ; and this is not one of the least of our titles to the esteem of mankind, little as we think of it now, when we have departed so far from our former elegance of manners ” (Martin, XII. 424). Nor are these dull, ignorant people worthy to be ranked with the Frenchwomen of whom Sydney Smith wrote : “ There used to be in Paris, under the ancient régime a few women of brilliant talents, who violated all the common duties of life, and gave very pleasant little suppers.” There can be no pleasant little suppers with persons dressed in the manner just described. No conversation is possible with a woman who has five hundred thousand francs’ worth of satin, lace, and jewels on her mind. These women are in fact purely histrionic persons, actresses, with whom a few words may be exchanged as they stand dressed to “go on”; but their minds are so preoccupied with their parts, their audience, and their trains, that conversation is out of the question. Happily, the play will end erelong, and then they will slink out of the stage door and go home, carrying their toggery with them.

It is sometimes spoken of as a shame to the ladies of America, England, and Christendom generally, that they should have stooped to imitate the women temporarily conspicuous in betrayed and plundered France. Perhaps, many centuries hence, mankind will have advanced so far in moral feeling and genuine civilization, that a wrong done to any portion of the race will be keenly felt by every other portion, and a face unjustly slapped in Australia will make cheeks tingle in Greenland. At present, however, this is not the case, and most of us bear the sorrows of others with fortitude. Ladies do not generally read the newspapers ; do not as yet consciously share in the public life of the race ; do not even generally know how the person whose garments they copy got her insatiable little hand into the treasury of saving, industrious France ; do not see the transparent artifices by which the French are amused and flattered, while they are held down and plundered ; do not recognize in the bewildering costumes of the Conspicuous Woman a means of corrupting one sex and enslaving the other.

Ladies do not think of politics when they go to Stewart’s to buy a new dress, and are much less concerned to know what is fashionable in France than what is "going to be worn ” by tire influential ladies of their own circle. Each country has its professional fashion-makers, who adapt French patterns to that country’s climate, circumstances, and taste, and it is with these that ladies have to do. Not one lady in a million, who has ceased to part her hair, or who hides the symmetry of her form in a panier, sees any connection between those acts and the politics of Europe. Let us not presume to censure the fairer part of creation. A woman with a full purse and an empty head must dress, or do worse; and, being totally unable to devise costumes herself, she must follow the fashions invented by people who have less money and more brains than herself.

These fashion-makers have become in some capitals, especially in New York, a numerous and very capable class ; and they, too, have been powerful stimulators of the clothes mania. I may say, indeed, that a sort of conspiracy exists between the makers and the originators of clothes, the grand object of which is to compel people to buy new garments before their old ones are worn out. I say compel, not merely tempt them to do so by the invention of new and pleasing styles (though that, too, is done), but force young and susceptible people to cast aside garments not half worn out, by making them prematurely old-fashioned.

I can best explain how this is done by recurring to an article already mentioned, the stove-pipe hat, which being still worn by about one half the men in the United States, is what is styled “ a leading article.” The great question which the chief hatters of this nation revolve in their ingenious minds is this : How can we make men dissatisfied with the hats they have, and fly to others which they see the dandies wear ? As many changes can be made in a hat as can be rung on those abominable “nine bells ” of the arithmetics. A hat has a crown and a brim. That crown can be high, low, straight, steeple, or bell-shaped ; and that brim can be narrow, wide, curling, straight, turned down or turned up. The whole structure can be large or it can be small. Of all the shapes which this kind of hat can assume, the one most popular, the one hardest to change, is the very one which happens to be most in vogue at this writing (February, 1869), namely, a moderate-sized bell, with a rather wide, curling brim. No shape is becoming to so many persons as this ; and hence, though the straight crowns and steeple crowns seldom run more than two years, the bell, once well established, can seldom be made to seem absurd in less than seven years. Now, the trick of the hatters, as of all other fashion-makers, male and female, is this : first, to push or develop the reigning fashion, as rapidly as possible, to an extreme which savors of the ridiculous; and then, as rapidly as possible, to recede from that extreme to an opposite one. At present the tendency is to make hats larger, more bell-like, and with a brim of more pronounced curl. But the impulse in that direction is nearly exhausted, and the newest hats begin to look absurdly large, too bellish, and curling. The moment is at hand when a movement, more or less violent, will take place in the opposite direction. If the hatters dared, they would dart at once to a minute and natty steeple crown ; but the public, in that case, would shy, and keep on wearing the bells. The next extreme, whatever it may be, will not be reached under two years, and it will be approached by such numerous and gradual changes, that most of our hats will be considerablyworn before we begin to be ashamed of them. Our tyrants will beware of going too fast with us ; for, after all, we can be masters if we will. We have to be deluded with the name and forms of freedom, while many of us are in reality the unresisting slaves of five men who keep Broadway hat-stores.

The recent tight trousers illustrate the same device. They grew tighter, and tighter, and tighter, until it was perilous to go abroad, and many of our young fellows looked like Master Shallow in his young days, when, as Falstaff informs us, he resembled “a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.” The moment a ridiculous extreme of tightness had been well established, our lords, the tailors, kindly shook out a reef, and relieved us. But the tight trousers, which they had compelled us to buy, hang on their pegs unworn, or adorn the store fronts of Chatham Street. Among the ladies, the present rage is to load every article of visible attire with ornament. “ We know,” says the editress of our chief fashionpaper, “ of a costume lately made, on which eighteen women spent two days in making the trimming.” If the modistes are true to their principles, they will push this fashion of excessive ornamentation until it becomes utterly monstrous ; and then, when every wardrobe is bursting with absurdity, they will turn as short a corner as they dare, and rush to an opposite extreme of simplicity. The object of all these tailors and dressmakers is, to make us loathe our clothes while they are still as good as new. But they could not work their will upon us without the co-operation of the small class in all our cities who live only to dress, and whose one cry is, “Give us something new to wear.” These start a fashion and give it a chance to “ take.” And as fortune is ever apt to favor the brave, it sometimes happens that accident aids the bold innovator who suddenly cuts off our coat tails, or takes in our trousers until we cannot pick up a lady’s handkerchief. All garments look well upon a fine form ; and there are legs which are more admirable the more distinctly they are revealed. Let but a perfectly formed man of some note wear tights and a bob-tail a few times in the view of the public, and every dandy is impatient until he has converted himself into a forked radish.

And yet our fashion-makers, though they have stimulated the clothes mania, are probably the very persons who will do most to cure it. Such, at least, was my impression the other day, after going over the largest fashion-making establishment in the world. America, which is destined to try all the experiments and solve all the problems, seems to have it in charge also to teach the Northern races how to dress. When an American takes hold of a thing, he is pretty sure to give it plenty of air. He is the great Advertiser. He instinctively aims at the million, knowingwell that there is little else in America but million, and knowing also that he who draws permanent tribute from the million must devise something truly serviceable. We have in New York four establishments whose sole or chief business is to invent fashions, sell fashion-plates, paper patterns, and printed directions for cutting garments. The one which I visited employs sixty persons, and is about to occupy the whole of a large building, of which the rent is fifteen thousand dollars a year. The stranger is shown into one "studio,” where a “ corps of artists,” men, sit assiduous, drawing upon stone the fashion prints for men’s clothes, to which the chief tailors of the city have contributed each one suit. There I saw the coats, waistcoats, trousers, hats, neck-ties, and boots which were to be in fashion five months later ; for, as the fashion-plate is sent to subscribers in February, it has to be drawn some weeks before ; and the ingenious authors of it have to project their minds into the future, and infer what men can be made to buy in June, from what they fancy in December. Sometimes they hit it, sometimes they miss ; the public may jump at a new device, or let it alone ; for, after all, the public can be led only by being led in the way in which it is inclined to go. He is the great fashion-maker who knows best how to interpret the unconscious tendency of the public taste.

In another room of this building is another “ corps of artists,” women, who contrive new fashions for the ladies, sold in the form of paper patterns, with directions for cutting attached. Now the great hits achieved in this "studio,” the patterns which sell most and longest, are such as combine with elegance the greatest number of utilities. The staple patterns are those which can be made easily, look well in cheap material, and harmonize with many other garments. I was expected to be surprised at the information, (but I was not.) that the person in New York who has shown the greatest fertility in inventing these universal and lasting patterns is “a girl from the woods of Maine,” who never saw fashionable costume till she was a grown woman, and now earns sixteen hundred dollars a year by the inventive talent which she was accidentally discovered to possess. This establishment publishes an illustrated catalogue, which contains pictures and descriptions of more than a thousand garments of ladies and children’s wear, patterns of any of which, with full directions for cutting, are sold for a few cents. There appears to be a great economy of brains and labor here, — three men and four women inventing the clothes for a great part of a populous country. These “artists” are becoming independent of Paris. They take all the Paris fashion-periodicals, read the fashion-letters from that city, adopt any device that seems to them suitable to America; but they never think of introducing a fashion merely because it has found favor with the temporary occupants of French palaces, or the demi-wives of the transient millionnaires of the Paris Bourse.

It is a curious thing, too, that the magazines and weekly papers published by or for the fashion-makers are as a class remarkable for good sense and healthy feeling. If they fill the souls of some ladies with visions of costume impossible to a slender purse, they have excellent editorials showing how wrong it is to sacrifice the substantial interests of a family to the false decoration of one or two members of it. They give alluring pictures of baby’s lace dresses, — $150 to $400 at Stewart’s, — but they tell mothers that it is highly ridiculous to provide such costly bibs for the absorption of sour milk. One of these papers—and it is a paper of most excellent tone, full of capital advice and just satire—has a circulation of sixty thousand copies, and it is, therefore, compelled to give its chief attention to the promulgation of really useful patterns. It follows the law which is converting the fashion-manufactories from stimulators into correctors of mania. The universal and prompt dissemination of every new device makes it impossible for any woman to gain distinction by novel changes of attire ; and we already see, at grand parties, that a few ladies of entirely assured position avoid in their dress everything that savors of the startling, and usually forbear the use of those very costly fabrics which they alone can wear without starving or stinting more important interests. Such ladies, of course, never exhibit anything conspicuous or costly in the street, and some of them even go to an extreme in the disregard of appearances out of doors. Of late, a few have gone further, and denied themselves the pleasure — to them alone an innocent pleasure — of wearing satin, velvet, and much lace.

Goethe says that folly can seldom be cured by denying to it all indulgence, and recommends that, in some cases, it should be nauseated by “ intoxicating draughts.” In this way, also, the fashion-papers may be of service, aided as they are by the fearful excesses in which some of the clothes maniacs indulge. There were “receptions ” given last winter in New York, which were, in the most literal meaning of the word, nothing but exhibitions of wearingapparel. No lady had any other object than to display her own costume, and to scrutinize that of others ; nor when she afterwards discoursed of the entertainment, had she anything to communicate except descriptions of dresses such as we read in letters from Paris. Indeed, the mere magnitude of the dresses was such in January and February, that every lady had as much on her mind in making her way about, as the pilot of one of those magnificent Bristol steamboats has on his, when, at 5.15 P. M., the stately craft moves majestically among the numberless ferry-boats and sailing vessels of the East River. A moment’s inattention, and smash ! the cabin is stove in. One glance at a friend who may be two or three dresses offhand rip ! away go the gathers. In time, let us hope, such experiences; as these may prove to be the nauseating draughts which Goethe recommends.

Men’s dress is now nearly perfect. It is cheap, durable, convenient, various ; and it may be elegant and becoming in a high degree. By devoting to the subject thirty minutes per annum, — fifteen in May and fifteen in September, — a man may provide himself with all the clothes which can contribute either to the comfort or the adornment of his person. A dress suit will last through ten seasons of pretty frequent parties, and still be presentable ; nor does it need any great firmness or good sense to enable a man to smile at the devices of tailors and fashion-makers, and stick to his clothes till they are worn out. As a rule, men in the United States do not dress well enough. A million of us ought to dress every evening for dinner, who do not, merely because we are not civilized enough. Our dirty streets and crammed public vehicles discourage dressing, and we indulge the delusion that we have not time or strength to dress after the labor of the day is done, though many mechanics do it who work ten hours a day, and travel an hour and a half besides.

With ladies, it is otherwise. Many of them have entirely run to clothes, as cucumbers run to seed. Men begin to maintain the Mahometan doctrine, that women have no souls. In former times, it was only the few thousand ladies connected with courts and aristocracies, who were subject to this kind of mania. But, at present, few women wholly escape it. In remote villages you will see foolish virgins in three or four different costumes on the same Sunday, and in cities you will find the wives of plain, laborious men squandering more money on a child’s dress than would maintain three sons in college.

We have all become so used to witnessing this entire devotion to dress, that when, by chance, we observe indications of intellectual or unimpaired physical life in a lady who has grown up under present influences, we are startled.

Twice in my life, I have fallen in love at first sight. The first time was in a bookstore in Boston, in the street named after the Father of his country. I was fresh from New York, where my afternoon walk is usually up the Fifth Avenue, a street in which the Mahometan doctrine just mentioned does not always seem so very irrational. This first love of mine was a girl of about seventeen, with a lovely bloom on her cheeks, and she wore a dress of blue something (not silk) with white spots in it. It was when I found out what that sweet girl had come to the store to buy that I gave way to the weakness alluded to above. She was lovely in herself, but, great heavens ! she was there buying a GAZETTEER! Here was a young lady, aged seventeen, who took interest enough in the world she inhabited to desire a catalogue of its contents ! Amazing ! Long she hesitated, anxious to choose the best. Shall it be Lippincott ? Shall it be Harper ? She made up her mind at last, paid for the book, and completed her conquest by carrying it home herself. I never saw her more ; I know not her name ; but I love her still, and often have a distracting vision of her when I see "those others,” in the Avenue which is numbered Five. It is only because I am not Dr. Holmes or Mr. Lowell, that I have not written out my Lines to a Young Lady in a Blue-Spotted Dress (not Silk) whom I saw buying a Gazetteer in a Boston Bookstore.

The other time was on the long piazza of a seaside hotel, also in New England. She was a married lady, a mother, and a writer of charming verse and prose. It had been her singular good fortune to be reared on that rockbound coast in such a way that her growth was never checked by excessive school, nor her freedom of movement hampered by irrational dress, or by false ideas of propriety. Her father being a landlord, a fisherman, a light-house keeper, and a man of sense and information, she had plenty of boats, rocks, fishingtackle, and suggestive conversation ; and so grew up absolutely free from every one of the pernicious restraints of a defective civilization. At the same time her mind was duly nourished with honest knowledge, and kept totally free from all the contracting superstitions. I never spoke to her. I should not know her face to-day, if I saw it. But what instantaneously captivated my affections was the wondrous beauty of her step ! Just to watch the glorious harmony, the perfect concert, of her movements,—was rapture. It is this darling of my memory in her coarse blue Dio Lewis boat-dress, that I think of when I see those gorgeous ladies carrying down the steps of a fashionable house an immense armful of clothes which they have been exhibiting at a reception.