That very many of the forms and appli- Depravity of purpose. ances which for upwards of three centuries have at intervals distinguished the fashions or styles of dress both of men and women* * To make this apparent to the eye, we depict three examples of fashion : the first showing the cod-shaped stomacher of the Elizabethan period; the second, the straight, long-waisted stay and frightful panniers of the early Georgian epoch; and the third, the no-waisted sack of the early days of the present century, a costume that, whilst it violated decency, proportion, and good taste, sinned less against the health of the wearer than either of the former fashions. Court influence. in the upper and wealthier classes of society, have exhibited not only an egregious absurdity of conception and of figure, but an alternate depravity of taste and purpose, no man of unbiassed judgment, acquainted with the development of modern civilization as displayed in the concurrent manners, customs, and dress of each period, can, or would, attempt to controvert. The specious maximş that found ready acceptance throughout European courtsociety from the middle of the seventeenth to that of the eighteenth centuries, to palliate, or at need, openly to uphold the artifice and follies of the world of Fashion, struck root so deeply into the congenial soil of modern civilization, that even yet, at the close of the nineteenth, they crop up around us at intervals as luxuriantly as ever, impersonated by the more modern dupes of the like pernicious sophisms. For in the present day are we not often as good as told, that there is no Art. beauty without aid, nor perfection that does Nature and not smack of barbarism if Art does not put her hand to it? That Art corrects what is bad, and perfects what is good! That Nature generally preserves the best in order that we may have recourse to Art for her improvement! That without Art man is uncouth, and all that he does is rude and gross! But they were not told that: There is ART and Art. That each and all of these artful yet shallow dogmas supplied its own converse of sense and of reading. Yet, in truth, it would have availed as little to have talked to them of Art in its æsthetic sense, as it would be even now to their more modern representatives of the World of Fashion. Perhaps it may not be amiss, here to introduce another diagram, or section of a modern lady in the mode of 1870. It will not be necessary for us to point to the artificial appliances used, or to descant upon them individually, as they doubtless Libels upon are visible to most of our readers at a glance. The pencil with a few strokes doing more than pages with the pen. 11870 With the trumpery, in the fullest sense of its etymological meaning-the tromperie —of the milliner, we do not concern ourselves; and as little with those multifarious appliances and appurtenances of the toilet, so aptly designated by the Romans as the mundus muliebris. But that these things, in all the Protean and pernicious forms which they have assumed in modern times, have been and are still asserted by those whom it pleases to resort to them, as by those who profit by pandering to their production, as demonstrative of the progress in refinement of modern taste and manners, cannot but suggest to every thinking mind that the term is but a blind and a pretence; that they much rather materially contribute not only to the disclosure of the hollowness at core of modern civilization, but show the abject littleness and pitiful fatuity with which, even in an assumed condition of high culture, the Human Mind will bow to the tyranny of an ideal, worshipped Despot of its own creation, even to the subjection of body and soul. That there is no exaggeration in this picture can be shown by the testimony of the past as well as by that which in our own time, and of our common cognizance, has fur C The ideal tyrant. |