i8 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for there is nothing more beautiful than beauty in old age. If she have 

 moderate beauty, she should do her utmost to make the best of it. If 

 she have no beauty, she ought to impart all that is possibly near to it 

 by every kind of justifiable supplement. If she be positively ugly, the 

 more is it her duty to use every legitimate art to hide the fact, and to 

 transform even ugliness into passable presentation. Look at an ugly 

 woman badly attired, and showing all the lines that offend taste. Look 

 at the same woman gracefully attired and fairly, artistically gotten up, 

 with some approach toward the beautiful, and who would hesitate to 

 pronounce in favor of a longer tete-d-ttte with the last of that woman 

 as compared with the first ? Why ! we blockheads of men are some- 

 times entirely taken in by skillful, ugly women. We look upon them 

 as handsome. The deception is justifiable, and our satisfaction is more 

 than a recompense for our stupidity. 



What is good for women is not worse for men, but I am sorry to 

 say that men are far behind women in their endeavors to assume the 

 beautiful. In my time I have never, off the stage, seen a man dressed 

 many removes from the hideous. When I first began to look at my 

 male seniors, universal black was the rage, black from head to foot ; 

 the very head, which was the only part of the animal that emerged out 

 of darkness, rising from a broad black ring called a stock, into which 

 the chin sometimes dropped. A little later, and an extremely tight 

 mode of dress came into fashion, a mode which is not yet entirely dis- 

 carded, but which still fits closely to those strangely occupied individ- 

 uals called " copers," about whom there is a mystery as to whether 

 their clothes were not originally and permanently modeled to their 

 bodies. Recently there has been some attempt at improvement in 

 English male attire. The surtout-coat, rather loosely fitting, and cut 

 so as to hang well from the shoulders, has imported a modest but good 

 change in fashion, while the looser and better-shaped nether habili- 

 ments have so improved in design that even the sculptors have, at last, 

 with much compunction of conscience, ventured to reproduce them in 

 marble. 



Still, in the attire of men, and I think I must say in the attire of 

 women also, a great deal is wanting in taste, and the most bigoted 

 Darwinian would hardly, I think, dare to declare the doctrine of " the 

 survival of the fittest " in respect of modern clothes, whatever he might 

 say of the wearers of them. 



I name these points that I may not be accused of feeling no care 

 for the fashion connected with dress. I would have good fashion go 

 with every hygienic improvement in clothes and clothing, and I know 

 it would be easy to prove that hygiene of dress could always be com- 

 bined with the most artistic and perfect of fashionable designings, by 

 which combination health, comfort, and elegance would all be insured. 



Such combination set forth as a national fashion should pass, as I 

 think, through all classes of the community ; for, assuredly, even at 



