Fashion prescribes all sorts of rules about breadths, gores, flounces, and such like, and these are the hints which she gives, and which ladies must take and apply to themselves to the best advantage.  There is ample margin allowed for each one to adopt what is best suited to her own particular style of beauty.  Perhaps there never was a time when so much liberty was allowed to ladies to dress according to their own fancy.  Of course we mean within certain limits.  If any one will consent to keep within those limits, and not do actual violence to the decrees of fashion, she may, to a considerable degree, follow her own fancy.  If the general idea which fashion has submitted to society as the sine qua non of being well dressed is borne in mind, she is very tolerant of the various modifications which ladies, for the most part, wisely adopt, that they may not make “guys” of themselves.  Nothing illustrates this more than the hats and bonnets which are worn.  Their variety is so great that their names might be termed “legion;” and a pretty woman may adopt all kinds of conceits, providing she neither offends the eye nor defies the prevailing fashion.  One may come out as a shepherdess, another like a Spanish cavalier in the time of Charles the Second, another with a three-cornered hat such as state-coachmen wear on “drawing-room days,” only of course a very small edition of it; another with a little coquettish hat that suggests one of Watteau’s most successful pictures; but no one may wear one of those large mushroom bonnets which were worn some five-and-thirty years ago, and which were ornamented by large bows of ribbon stiffened with wire, and by great nosegays of flowers which resembled a garden flower-pot.  It is only on condition that no violence is done to the decrees of fashion or to the ideas she would suggest, that so much liberty is allowed.  We think that the result is most satisfactory, as there is an infinite variety to please the eye, and there are abundant opportunities for every one to attend to her own comfort and ease.  Of course there have been, and still are, certain fashions which are quite “dirigueur” among the really fashionable world, and which are annoying to the public generally, such as large crinolines and long skirts, and more especially the long trains which are now in vogue.  Crinolines, though reduced in size, are not discarded, except in some instances which, as our eyes are not yet accustomed to their absence, present a scarcely decent appearance.

One word more before we close this division of our subject.  If persons are inclined to rail against Fashion and denounce it, let them remember that there is a fashion in everything.  In thought, in politics, in physic, in art, in architecture, in science, in speech, in language, and even in religion we find fashion to have a guiding and governing power.  How can we otherwise account for the change which has taken place in language, which is not the same that it was fifty years ago?  There are phrases