and beauty within and without are looked on, not as distinct trades, as in England, but as parts of a duty owed to our fellow-creatures and to the best that is in us. With English people it is very different. Let us put a case. AN EPISODE OF DRESS. I go one evening to visit a family of sisters, well-born, welleducated, and sufficiently well off. The eldest is called Emily. She is not pretty, and never was, and has now reached eight-andtwenty, and become the chaperone of her younger sisters. She has never been engaged, and seems to think that as her fourth sister is now eighteen, she has herself no further chance of marrying, and has only to accept cheerfully her role of old maid of the family. It is no doubt her destiny never to be cared for by anybody, and she was intended for one of the Useful Ones. So she goes in for extreme usefulness, is an admirable daughter, despises amusements as "nice for the young ones, but rather frivolous," wears her soft brown hair scraped down on each side of her face "tidily," high unfashionable dresses in the evening, thinks of every one's comfort and happiness but her own, and refuses to dance. I find Emily, on my arrival, in a dark silk dress, knitting a stocking, in the strongest light in the room. As the gas pours on her patient face, I notice instantly that she is somewhat passée; in any other place this might have been unobserved, for I know her to be only twenty-eight, though to-night I find it difficult to believe it; her features are well-formed, but the style of dressing the hair absolutely forces on your attention the increasing hollowness of her cheek. I remember a young fellow who liked her very much last year, and would probably have ended by telling her so, but he could not stand her practised old-maidish ways and sayings; in short, he could not marry a girl who would not sit still for a single moment without knitting. I have seen Emily look younger than she looks to-night; but that was one sunny day in a room whose pink blinds were drawn down to the ground. She Emily shakes hands with fingers entangled in grey worsted, knits hard through my second sentence, and then, lest attention to me should cause her to drop a stitch, I go off to find Alice, who is the pretty one of the four. A prettier girl I have never seen than Alice -as she looks sometimes; but she makes terrible mistakes. has what is called golden hair-that is, drab. She has heard that people with fair hair ought to wear blue. So she wears blue-a shade too dark, which does not impart a scrap of yellow to her hair. She has a velvet band fastened tightly across it-her head is not a pretty shape, though she has a sweet smile-she does not know that a broad band across the hair is the most trying thing in the worldnot one head in twenty can bear it. I don't discover her for some minutes the drawing-room is a very gay one, with sky-blue doors, and white walls and ceiling. Presently I discern Alice sitting against the blue door in the usual blue dress a shade too deep. She informs me that I have passed her twice-I do not think I am to blame ! Her next sister, Dora, is standing by her in white: her dress is merino; and though evidently new, from the angular form of the plaits and the loud crackling of the lining, it naturally looks dirty against the snowy freshness of the paper on the wall. Having just come in from the dark street, the extreme whiteness of the room dazzles me; I can't see outlines. Dora is very sallow, and unhappily carries a blue fan, which makes her look as yellow as a guinea. Clemence "6 came out" last week; and is nearly as pretty as Alice in her way. She has a dark complexion which, when she has a colour, is very clear and beautiful. She is a little coquette, and just now, when she does not know I am watching her, she looks charming. I can just see her profile against a pure yellow screen which I have always hitherto hated for its raw colour, because they generally have the gaslight sharp upon it. To-night the lamp happens to be on one side, and the hue which it borrows in the halflight enhances the slight flush on Clemence's check. I cannot see her dress, for a large crimson chair stands between us. She knows I admire her. When she observes me she will blush, and perhaps banter me. Now she turns and comes forward. Alas! she wears a satin dress the exact colour of her face, with flounces up to the waist. I had always fancied her tall-to-night she appears hardly four feet high this is caused by the flounces. I am disappointed, and liked her better behind the chair. As we speak she turns her head over with what would be a pretty gesture if she had not a scar on her throat, and places against her cheek a scarlet fan-this is the finishing touch -which takes away absolutely every vestige of her colour. She looks positively hideous as she stands. I will go back to Alice. Alice has the prettiest of shoulders, and perhaps that may excuse her for adopting a fashion so ugly as a low dress. Her arms are a little too fat, and rather red at the elbow. The hard straight line around her neck, trimmed with hard X's in blue velvet, would ruin any neck but hers. Imagine Sir Thomas Lawrence painting a lady with such a pattern on her dress! She is occupied in welcoming some guests. Who is the old young lady who has just come into the room with a lady so fat and décolletée that her friends ought to shut her up? The old young lady is terribly thin, and also very décolletée. There is a frightful hollow in her back; the vertebræ of her spine are like a crocodile's; but she is a brave woman, and obeys the fashion. She has also lost a tooth. Probably she is one of Emily's sort-abhors what is false her hair is very thin, so much so that it would be true to say she had none, but she would scorn a single band of false hair. I said the fat woman was also alarmingly décolletée,-I don't know which of them is most offensive. Her gloves are cutting through her wrists, her voluminous white and pink train impedes her already difficult progress. My hostess's daughters are better than this! I perceive Emily's foot: it is large: she seems rather proud of its size, and protrudes it, encased in a conspicuous white kid sheath, as a mark of her superiority to these considerations of form. Alice, I know, has a tiny little foot: to-night it is entirely concealed by the most enormous rosettes I have ever seen, and might be as big as a Pict's. The last straw has been laid on my back, and I take my leave. To a man who has a quick eye for the picturesque, or, let us say, the appropriate, and there are such men, these sights in modern drawing-rooms are more than disagreeable-they are ghastly. I am saying nothing about indecency. That is hardly a portion of my present subject. But why, if a woman has a neck like a skeleton, must she tell the world so? Why, if fate has made her grow stouter than it is permitted to be, must she squeeze and fold her fat into a tight low dress because it is the fashion? Why must she draw a hard line around her shoulders, that seems to cut her in two, and wear sleeves which are mere straps to keep her gown on, without caring, without knowing, whether her arms are models? Why must she wear trimmings of great O's and X's and vandykes on her skirt, so that at a little distance the first thing about her that strikes the eye is the trimming? Why, if very tall, must she take the arm of a very little man, and make herself and him look absurd? Why will she draw attention to her want of colour by wearing red or arsenic green? Why, with red hair, is her dress pink? Why, when in a very pale dress, does she lean against the wall which the barbarity of English ignorance has papered with white? Why, with black hair, does she carry a heavy burden of jet flowers, combs, and impossibly thick plaits that make her head look like an elephant's on an antelope's body? Why will she trust to the very moderate gifts nature has endowed her with, to fight against the most abnormal disadvantages? Why-why-but enough :-these are only some of the insane mistakes that nearly all girls commit, many of them girls with artistic tastes and capacities, in every direction except dress, whose eyes you may see shine with pleasure at a sunset or a beau-flower-which nevertheless they steadily refuse to take a hint from? Very few women know what style of dress suits them best, or what colours even those who study the art study it wrongly. One may often see a woman who has the makings of a dignified goddess se poser en coquette, or a little creature attempt to be stately who can only be simple. The best grace is perfect naturalness. Our manners form themselves, but we must form our setting of them. Nature can do much, but not everything. Art should do something. You must choose suitable colours and suitable shapes for your dresses, you must study the room that you are to appear in, if you ever mean to look right; and if you know not what kind of room you are about to be seen in, or if you know that it is one of the modern white and glaring drawing-rooms, a plain black dress (but never with low neck and short sleeves) will always be safe. The reason that an ordinary low neck with short sleeves looks worse in black than in any other colour is because the hard line round the bust and arms is too great a contrast to the skin. A low neck always lessens the height, and a dark dress made thus lessens it still more, and it strikes the artistic eye as cutting the body in pieces, in this way-If you see a fair person dressed in a low dark dress, standing against a light background some way off, the effect will be that of an empty dress hung up, the face, neck, and arms being scarcely discernible (fig. 1) On the other hand, against a dark background the head and bust will be thrown up sharply, and the whole dress and body will disappear (fig. 2). This effect, often enough seen, is execrably bad. If you must wear a low black dress, let it be cut square, giving the height of the shoulders (or better, the angles rounded, for corners are very trying), and have plenty of white or pale gauze, or thin black net, to soften the harsh line between the skin and the dress. White gauze or lace softens down the blackness of the dress at the edge of the bodice, and thin black stuff has an equally good effect, as it shades the whiteness of the skin into the dark colour of the gown. Only under these conditions does the sudden contrast enhance, as some persons suppose, the fairness of the complexion. Nature abhors sharp edges. We see contrasts in flowers and in marbles; but they are always softened, each colour stealing a little of the other at the junction of the two. Even the sharp edges of a crag or house against the sky are seen by a practised eye to gather some softening greyness either from the surrounding colours or by mere perspective. Trees grow thin at the edges and melt into the sky; in a prism, of course, we see the tender amalgamations of hues more distinctly, the secondaries lying clearly between the primaries. Ruskin had noticed this surely when he said, "All good colour is gradated," each mixed into the next where there are contrasts. Low DRESSES. It is a mystery how any fashion so hideous or so unmeaning as the modern low dress ever came in. There was nothing approaching it in bareness of design, in poverty of invention, or opportunities for indecency, in the days of the finest costumes-I had almost said in any previous age. There have been many corrupt fashions, but they have been almost always picturesque ones. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the women were sufficiently décolletée for such a book to be published as "A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders," with a preface by Richard Baxter, and they were as bad in the eighteenth century; but then if the dress was not high behind, the arms were covered to the elbow-the whole effect was not so scanty and fleshy as the modern low neck and back, and shoulderstraps. This last fashion must have been introduced gradually. Some leader of fashion who had beautiful shoulders thought it a pity they should bloom unseen, and may have pushed down the high dress accordingly. Well, if you are not shy about exposing your neck, a dress pushed open loosely is not ugly, far from it. There would be folds naturally falling in a pretty form, nearly horizontally. Probably at first the actual shoulder-joint was hidden, then, as the rage for self-display increased, and as the ladies emulated each other in it, the dress got to be entirely off the shoulder-and possibly the straight horizontal plaits round the shoulders of our mothers in their girlish days were the remnants, or an imitation, of the natural folds. Then the enterprising dressmaker soon yearned for a change of ornament, and the loose "Berthe" gradually hardened into the plain, tight, low bodice, with a still harder and more. unmeaning tucker sewn in (once the close chemise), run through with a black string, from which we so long have suffered. The sleeves shrunk shorter and shorter, from the elbow rich with ruffles, to the round bell-sleeve, then to degenerate variations of it, till it narrowed into a finger-wide foundation for bows and laces, and became, finally, the detestable "strap." Again, observe the unmeaningness of the low-neck fashion. Our mothers wore low dresses and bare arms all day long; they knew if their shoulders and arms were beautiful they would look as well by daylight as by candlelight; if, in their daily occupations, the English climate would not temper its winds to the shorn lambs or limbs of fashion, they tucked in a kerchief, or fastened on long sleeves in the morning. Why, the servant-maids wore low-dresses too, at that time. There was some sense then in throwing off the kerchief in the evening, when there was nothing harder to be done than chatting in a warm drawing-room, and exposing as much of the body as it was fashionable to display above what we may call the Bran. It was not unmeaning then. In those days people were only just recovering from the extraordinary classic mania of 1794, under the influence of David the painter. There was not a vestige of crinoline, not too many petticoats, and no folds; and as the entire form and action of the body were distinguishable, a lady had to be very careful how she crossed her legs, lolled on sofas, or ran across a room. To do such things gracefully was the study of every girl; hence, walking and |