Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 443 
times are followed, a dress in itself, perhaps, extravagant and absurd, 
its ugliness further enhanced by the divergence of later styles, pre¬ 
sents difficulties they cannot well escape; sometimes to the extent 
of greatly reducing and marring the grand effect. An historical 
picture becomes a display of costumes rather than of characters, 
and is liable at first sight to impress the observer as an ugly col¬ 
lection of oddities, to be deciphered and translated into the language 
of human passion, with such labor and perplexity as one might en¬ 
counter in searching for his friends in a masked ball. The difficulty 
has been often evaded by the substitution of chissical drapery. 
This has the advantage that it presents in itself a form at once 
graceful and secondary; and the greater advantage that it gives con¬ 
stant and bold hint of the outline beneath, hangingfrom it, or lying 
free and close upon it. Thus art, placed between an anachronism 
and an absurdity, naturally chooses the former. Our garments, 
especially those of women, are artistically objectionable in present¬ 
ing a complex, independent, ungraceful and meaningless form; in 
even going further, and indicating distortions of form, which nature, 
in all her slips and malfeasance, rarely knows anything of. Waists, 
slopes of the back, attitudes, are presented, fortunately as foreign 
to symmetrical, erect, agile life, as they are to beauty. 
The camel and the dromedary have been an enigma to me. I 
have been reluctant to call any living thing ugly, yet how avoid it 
in these cases? The flabby, splay-foot; the coarse, half-bare, half- 
hairy hide; the callous knees, the shuffling gait, and, to crown all, 
the unwholesome hump—yet just at this point, fashion comes in 
to correct our crude opinion, and take to itself a model. 
That fashion is utterly divorced from art, is but too plainly indi¬ 
cated in these monstrosities which it takes so much pains to con¬ 
struct, and forces into notice with such hardihood. Those savage 
fancies reappear in them, which in some tribes establish or enhance 
abnormal developments, by way of giving distinction amid the 
monotony of merely symmetrical, well-formed limbs. The body of 
man, in its pre-eminent beauty, abjures this distortion and misrep¬ 
resentation, and does not easily brook the obstruction to its force, 
occasioned by the complex forms of garments utterly alien to it, 
and, therefore, meaningless. The dress of men, while meeting in 
a satisfactory manner its daily uses, is often subject in a high de¬ 
gree to this objection of form. The human limbs are chalked out 
