448 
Annual Report of the 
as the products of Grecian art are still enthroned in Christian art. 
What, therefore, can fashion, that varies under no known law, that 
shifts incessantly merely to escape itself, have to do with beauty, 
that rests on a throne as firm in its symmetry, grandeur, and en¬ 
during finish as that of virtue itself! Take any article of dress, a 
bonnet, for instance; let the cunning fingers of the hour shape and 
adorn it till all female critics exclaim upon it as “ a stylish thing,” 
“a perfect love of a thing!” Now restore it unharmed to its box, 
and let two years pass before it shall again see the light. What 
wonderful change has befallen it, that when now criticised it has 
become laughable and absurd, in girlish parlance, “awful;” some¬ 
thing that cannot be given away, that would ruin the peace of 
mind of any votary of dress. Does'beauty, then, steal away like 
perfume? Is it a volatile gas that escapes under the tightest cork¬ 
ing? Ah, it never was beautiful, for it never was fitted, admirably 
or otherwise, to any use on earth or under the earth, save, per¬ 
chance, the wretched one of tickling with vanity the modicum of 
brains it is able to cover. The discarded trinket has grown shabby 
without service and laughable without change. A remnant of yes¬ 
terday’s masquerade, it should have been burned when the farce was 
over. The taint of last 3^ear’s foil}' is in it, as certainly and dis¬ 
ting u ishably as the smell of the debauch of the previous evening 
in a shut-up bar-room. 
It is fortunate alone in being capable of destruction, unlike the 
crinoline, that dismal skeleton of fashion which tangles us in the 
garret, trips us behind the garden-wall, and turns up as the last 
thing that choked the gutter. 
Fashion is a wanton, fleet of foot, casting backward on those who 
pursue her tantalizing, contemptuous glances; yet provoking and 
stimulating their futile speed by those idle badges of distinctions 
which she drops in the heat of the race for the foremost. 
Whatever might be the gains of sober taste in the wealthier 
classes by an emancipation in dress, it is very sure that these would 
become greater, very much greater, as we pass downward in the 
scale of expenditure. The poor, and those of more moderate means, 
suffer severely from the tyrannies of fashion and gain little from 
its elegancies. 
Whatever merit the long dress may have when it sweeps, in rich 
folds, a W ilton carpet, disappears when it hangs in lank, thin 
