in man or woman becomes excessive.  It does so unquestionably when it engrosses the mind to the neglect of more important things.  But I suppose that all reasonable people now believe that scrupulous attention to personal cleanliness, freshness, and neatness is a Christian duty.  The days are past, almost everywhere, in which piety was held to be associated with dirt.  Nobody would mention now, as a proof how saintly a human being was, that, for the love of God, he had never washed his face or brushed his hair for thirty years.  And even scrupulous neatness need bring with it no suspicion of puppyism.  The most trim and tidy of old men was good John Wesley; and he conveyed to the minds of all who saw him the notion of a man whose treasure was laid up beyond this world, quite as much as if he had dressed in such a fashion as to make himself an object of ridicule, or as if he had forsworn the use of soap.  Some people fancy that slovenliness of attire indicates a mind above petty details.  I have seen an eminent preacher ascend the pulpit with his bands hanging over his right shoulder, his gown apparently put on by being dropped upon him from the vestry ceiling, and his hair apparently unbrushed for several weeks.  There was no suspicion of affectation about that good man; yet I regarded his untidiness as a defect, and not as an excellence.  He gave a most eloquent sermon; yet I thought it would have been well, had the lofty mind that treated so admirably some of the grandest realities of life and of immortality been able to address itself a little to the care of lesser things.  I confess, that, when I heard the Bishop of Oxford preach, I thought the effect of his sermon was increased by the decorous and careful fashion in which he was arrayed in his robes.  And it is to be admitted that the grace of the human aspect may be in no small measure enhanced by bestowing a little pains upon it.  You, youthful matron, when you take your little children to have their photographs taken, and when their nurse, in contemplation of that event, attired them in their most tasteful dresses and arranged their hair in its prettiest curls, you know that the little things looked a great deal better than they do on common days.  It is pure nonsense to say that beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.  For that is as much as to say that a pretty young woman, in the matter of physical appearance, is a person of whom no more can be made.  Now taste and skill can make more of almost anything.  And you will set down Thomson’s lines as flatly opposed to fact, when your lively young cousin walks into your room to let you see her before she goes out to an evening party, and when you compare that radiant vision, in her robes of misty texture, and with hair arranged in folds the most complicated, wreathed, and satin-shoed, with the homely figure that took a walk with you that afternoon, russet-gowned, tartan-plaided, and shod with serviceable boots for tramping through country