of fashions, not in generations only, but in decades and years of a generation, as if the mass had no mind or taste of its own, but submitted to the irresponsible ukase of tailors and modistes, who are in alliance with enterprising manufacturers of novelties.  In this higher civilization a costume which is artistic and becoming has no more chance of permanence than one which is ugly and inconvenient.  It might be inferred that this higher civilization produces no better taste and discrimination, no more independent judgment, in dress than it does in literature.  The vagaries in dress of the Western nations for a thousand years past, to go back no further, are certainly highly amusing, and would be humiliating to people who regarded taste and art as essentials of civilization.  But when we speak of civilization, we cannot but notice that some of the great civilizations; the longest permanent and most notable for highest achievement in learning, science, art, or in the graces or comforts of life, the Egyptian, the Saracenic, the Chinese, were subject to no such vagaries in costume, but adhered to that which taste, climate, experience had determined to be the most useful and appropriate.  And it is a singular comment upon our modern conceit that we make our own vagaries and changeableness, and not any fixed principles of art or of utility, the criterion of judgment, on other races and other times.

The more important result of the study of past fashions, in engravings and paintings, remains to be spoken of.  It is that in all the illustrations, from the simplicity of Athens, through the artificiality of Louis XIV and the monstrosities of Elizabeth, down to the undescribed modistic inventions of the first McKinley, there is discoverable a radical and primitive law of beauty.  We acknowledge it among the Greeks, we encounter it in one age and another.  I mean a style of dress that is artistic as well as picturesque, that satisfies our love of beauty, that accords with the grace of the perfect human figure, and that gives as perfect satisfaction to the cultivated taste as a drawing by Raphael.  While all the other illustrations of the human ingenuity in making the human race appear fantastic or ridiculous amuse us or offend our taste, —­except the tailor fashion-plates of the week that is now,—­these few exceptions, classic or modern, give us permanent delight, and are recognized as following the eternal law of beauty and utility.  And we know, notwithstanding the temporary triumph of bad taste and the public lack of any taste, that there is a standard, artistic and imperishable.