tremble in her own guilty heart lest she be that woman of "weak mind and low education" in danger of every embroidered coat that comes her way and fated to meet her ruin in the lure of a gold galloon. To the experienced lover of finery, such as I have come with the years to be, it is of course clear, page by page, that Addison knew the cut and color of every fashion as no virtuous moralist ever could, and distinguished between the hood and hat with all the emotion of a man of taste. He deplores the inundation of brocades from France! Do but open the covers of The Spectator and you will be swept away on a flood of petticoats and head-dresses and fans and powder-bags and puffs and little muffs. For all the color and splendor of ladies' dress Addison had appropriated to his imagination and had set ingeniously as a decoration to his pages! Off his guard he will, moreover, avow his sympathy openly, as when he describes the cluster of ladies sitting together at the opera "in the prettiest colored hoods.” “I looked," he exclaims, "with as much pleasure on this little assembly as upon a bed of tulips." And he notes with charming pedantry that one hood is blue and another yellow and another philomot; that the fourth is of a pink color and the

fifth pale green. "I did not know

whether it might be an embassy of Indian Queens; but upon going about the pit and taking them in front, I was immediately undeceived and saw so much beauty in every face that I found them all to be English."

Surely it is not the part of an earnest Puritan to concern himself either with English beauties or Indian queens, or to know pink so scrupulously from yellow, or blue from green, or to recognize philomot as a serious enough idea to entertain at all. Nor again can one account other than whimsical, protests against petticoats, big as canopies, on the part of the writer of the following sentences: "I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned

with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot and swan shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow it!"

Thus, Addison for his own great ends carrying on his hypocrisy, others followed his famous example, and the beautiful art of dress fell into disrepute among us. To-day finery has become a thing for fashion-mongers to parley and trade with. Even novelists and romancers dare no longer dress a girl generously in tradition's pink and white finery; or a fop in lavender gloves and gold chains; or put such a muff as Sophia Western never knew the want of into a lady's hands on a winter's morning, or pattern intricately the sunshade she raises above her lovely head on a midsummer afternoon. How different was it in the old days, when a poet had no sooner named the dwellingplace of his heroine and said that the gods loved the brightness of her hair, than he continued:

The outside of her garments was of lawn,
The lining purple silk with gilt stars drawn ;
Her kirtle blue whereon was many a stain,
Made by the blood of wretched lovers slain.
Upon her head she ware a myrtle wreath,
From whence her veil reached to the ground
beneath :

Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves, Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives;

About her neck hung chains of pebble-stone, Which lighten'd by her neck like diamonds

shone.

She ware no gloves: for neither sun nor wind Would burn or parch her hands but to her

mind,

Or warm or cool them, for they took delight To play upon those hands, they were so white. But if she had no gloves, she had a fan.

So on she goes and in her idle flight
Her painted fan of curled plumes let fall
Thinking to train Leander therewithal.

And in the same way all the ladies in the
old books had finery of their own,
"Gloves, garters, stockings, shoes, and
strings, of winning colors;" a straw-
berry handkerchief in a tragedy, and in
a tale "a broche of gold," lettered Amor
vincit omnia.

So too, I remember, had fine gentlemen in the past—whether knights, courtiers, wits, or beaux - all in turn their rich attires. In the days, that was, when their armor mirrored the sun and "pagan knights stood all round bright as sky;" when they themselves set the fashion in sleeves, the sleeve Amadis and the sleeve à la Mameluck,- and before the plume à la gentilhomme had gone to droop from a lady's toque. I can believe, indeed, that feathers may still float in their fancy, and that the finest gentleman of all stretches his imagination with the old popes and princes to peach-colored velvet and the sweet fashion of a brocade.

But unless it be thus in idea, the pride of dress is for them snuffed out. Velvet Venetians, doublets in damask, carnation silk stockings, fringed gloves, kneebuckles all a-glitter, hats furbelowed with jewels or feathers — all the old catalogue of gorgeousness belongs now for them not to the world of every day but to the stage world. No gentleman of present fashion could squander a fortune on his wedding clothes, if he would; no grave writer of tragedies could go, like Dr. Johnson, to the extravagance of bordering his coat with gold lace for a First Night; no "fortunate youth" of this late century could drive post through France to choose flowered silk for a waistcoat. The fop of fops — once a silken fellow," a "painted image!" has at the moment not a garment to appeal to the imaginative lover of finery - but he must" love in serge," must trick himself out, from boot to hat, according to the dictates of ugly modern oracles, the

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Convenient and the Correct. In behalf of the former, the Convenient, there is of course nothing to plead : briefly, the worship of ease is for the vulgar. The beautiful discomfort of armor, let us say, or of a powdered periwig, was to be endured. For the Correct, on the other hand, there is perhaps an argument to be brought. Its charm is academic, truly; but to temperaments that love a severe perfection, grave cloth and white linen unvaryingly disposed must always make their appeal and who shall pronounce them

for a monk or an idealist not suitable apparel ?

To the worldling serge presents grave dangers; and this not merely in the case of fine gentlemen but in that of their fair confederates as well. Addison himself noted the gentlewomen of his day who rode as female cavaliers, tying up their hair in a bag or ribbon in imitation of the smart part of the opposite sex. An immodest custom! And I can imagine that as in the old world perukes had their seeming charm for "tall lovely prudes," so in the modern the greatcoat and stiff hat may allure them. Such affectations, I need hardly say, are not for the woman of feeling. Stuffs of pomp and color do rather persuade her; her head is full of beautiful intricate patterns; skirts softly flowing, capes and fichus, make her proper dress. Nor is the serious lover of finery dressed merely for the flattery of her looking-glass. She is conscious of her clothes as part of the world's great show: she dresses for her type, whether it be Great Lady, Shepherdess, or Blue Stocking. She is true to her period and will not aspire to powder and a high head-dress if she be born to the soft curls of Charles the Second's day. Fashion, it is well known, favors the fair, and by an easy metaphor may be said to turn her wheel no less than Fortune does. So with a swing she will again dress her votaries à la Diane and à la Minerve, and let chapeaux Henri IV once more become outof-date vanities before Victorian bonnets. For my part I commend a quick chang

ing fashion, and, could I have chosen my period, would have fixed on the fickle years of the First Empire, when fashions shifted from week to week; and that, too, with such fine shades of difference that only the most frivolous could follow them. Then the Great Conqueror brought to Paris finery from the ends of the earth: muslins from India, garlands of roses from Bengal, stuffs shining with gold and silver from Cairo; from Turkey, of course, turbans; and from the far East shawls; shawls from Cashmere, from Persia, from the Levant; shawls particolored, blue bright blue and red and green and black and the clear yellow of the sun; shawls patterned with all the interlacings of Asian caprice, and fit, not only to hang from the shoulders of the fair, but to give a coquette of Eastern fancy day-long visions of the Orient. From the past, for all time as well as all the earth was then Napoleon's, came the fashion of the troubadours, - chapeaux à Creneaux, sleeves à la Mameluck, cheveux à l'enfant, — lending to a very modern period, who can say what charming Gothic airs? How do not such revolutions of fashion enlarge the feminine heart and teach it to live in all ages and all climates!

A woman of mind will go even further; she will not merely have a sense of the romance of her clothes fetched from the ends of the world, but in the choice of every garment will let her wit play a part. "I have bought myself a robe de chambre," wrote Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter," of the same stuff as your last skirt. It is admirable: there is a little green in it, but violet prevails. In a word, I was tempted and I fell. They wanted me to face it with flame-colour, but that I thought would have the air of a final impenitence. The outside is sheer weakness, and such a lining would have been wickedness itself, and to my mind contrary to good taste." So charming can a

woman of feeling be about a mere dressing-gown! So can she by her own greatness put her finery beyond Time's power to fade or tatter!

Mere fine ladies, fantastical coquettes, must look to others to celebrate their dresses,—to give themselves existence, I might say! For apart from their clothes there is no life, no delight in them. "All's in the whistling of their snatch't up silks."

These, however, they may not only trail through to-day's pageant, but if they be born under the pretty star of an auspicious fashion and chance to catch a poet's ear, they may trust the liquefaction of their clothes to last out three centuries with Julia's.

The hope of all finery is in art, I should say, were it not yet more true that the hope of art is in "a good dressing." Painters know this and have already adorned their canvases with the greatest garments of our age a haughty Beauty's riding-dress reflected for a moment in a mirror, a Dancer's yellow petticoats, an Old Lady's soft black and delicate laces. But all these still wait to be put into words. It is time for some poet again to rhyme,

Lawn as white as driven snow

And cypress black as e'er was crow; for the modern playwright to see to it that his ladies enter the scene as "gallant" as they did in King James's time; and above all for the student of manners to find in present-day fashion his great theme. Time measures the duration of painted dresses no less than of those of silk and purple; but a skirt, a flounce, a slipper, set in a beautiful sentence, lives more than a mortal life. I long for the finery of our time thus to outdate its period; for it to go down the centuries in similes, exordiums, and metaphors; and by its very imagery to suggest to less splendid ages all the beauty and luxury of ours.

As a point of departure, listen to a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke:"Chrr! sings the reel. The line tightens. The little rod firmly gripped in my hands bends into a bow of beauty, and a hundred feet behind us a splendid silver salmon leaps into the air. What is it?' cries the gypsy, 'a fish?' It is a fish, indeed, a noble ouananiche, and well hooked. Now if the gulls were here who grab little fish suddenly and never give them a chance; and if the mealymouthed sentimentalists were here, who like their fish slowly strangled to death in nets, they should see a fairer method of angling.

"The weight of the fish is twenty times that of the rod against which he matches himself. The tiny hook is caught painlessly in the gristle of his jaws. The line is long and light. He has the whole lake to play in, and he uses almost all of it, running, leaping, sounding the deep water, turning suddenly to get a slack line. The gypsy, tremendously excited, manages the boat with perfect skill, rowing this way and that way, advancing or backing water to meet the tactics of the fish, and doing the most important part of the work.

"After half an hour the ouananiche begins to grow tired and can be reeled in near to the boat. We can see him distinctly as he gleams in the dark water. It is time to think of landing him. Then we remember with a flash of despair that we have no landing-net! To lift him from the water by this line would break it in an instant. There is not a foot of the rocky shore smooth enough to beach him on. Our caps are far too small to use

as a net for such a fish. What to do? We must row around with him gently and quietly for another ten minutes, until he is quite weary and tame. Now let me draw him softly toward the boat, slip my fingers under his gills to give a firm hold, and lift him quickly over the gunwale before he can gasp or kick. A tap on the head with the empty rod-case, - there he is, the prettiest land-locked salmon that I ever saw, plump, round, perfectly shaped and colored, and just six and a half pounds in weight, the record fish of Jordan Pond." 1

A good description! A fine, a stirring description! A masterly record of a masterly feat! It makes the blood tingle; it makes the lover of the rushing torrent, of the still, deep mountain lake and of the crisp, clear, northern days, impatient with the city streets, with his desk, his papers, and his problems; it whets his hunger and thirst for a holiday, and for more life in God's magnificent' out-ofdoors; it makes him slightly irritated with the winter, when perforce he must abandon nature to itself, and leaves him but to dream of the days when the warm sun shall have drawn the ice from the lakes and when the released waters go tumbling down to the sea.

And yet why is it that there are some whom the description cannot allure to spend their hours of recreation in a kindred manner? Why is it that while each and every element of the narrative makes us thrill with longing for the open, the story as a whole arouses in a few a feeling akin to repulsion? Why is it that 1 Henry van Dyke: "Some Remarks on Gulls." Scribner's Magazine, August, 1907.

some at least would have enjoyed rather the picture of the lake in the wood, girt with yellow shore line and the green and gray of timber, the surface ruffled here and there by the gulls taking their afternoon bath, the concentric circles telling of the trout just nosing the air to snare the unsuspecting insect or to touch the mystery of a world unlike their own, the sudden rush, leap and plunge, the flash of color, "russet and silver flecked with black," of the ouananiche rising from the deep waters he loves so well and like lightning returning thither? Why is it that some would rather allow these incidents to touch the imagination and to stimulate it to follow the living activities of nature, than win their exhilaration at the expense of suffering? Why is it that day by day the numbers seem to increase of those yielding to mercy rather than to the instinct of the chase, and of those who rejoice when they are persecuted with such an epithet as mealy-mouthed sentimentalist?

I confess that such is my reaction, that I must count myself among the mealymouthed sentimentalists. But confession is not always either heart-cleaning or mind-cleaning. Along with it there must run a justification which at least palliates the offense in the sight of the one who acknowledges his fault. And how can the sentimentalist sanction his aversion to those forms of sport that entail the suffering of fish and bird and beast?

The sentimentalist has first to acknowledge that a radical change in his feeling toward animate nature has been worked since the days of boyhood, and naturally he hopes that the transformation of sentiment is not a sign of atavism but rather one of deepening sympathy. The days are still fresh in mind when, armed with the sling, he relieved his hunter's instinct by plunging into the woods of summer, there to listen for the birds, then to find, and then to kill; or into the woods of winter, there to build his hut and kindle his fire, and then to follow the trail of the rabbit and to set VOL. 101 - NO. 5

his snare. He can almost breathe the air, feel the yielding of the turf, and hear the ripple of the brook as he lay in the long grass in the meadows near Wachusett and drew the trout from the pools beneath the banks. He can recall with that delicious accompaniment of wellearned meat -the watering mouth the spectacle of eleven five-inch beauties, fried in crumbs, the product of his own first gamy angling. And he can remember, O! so vividly, with what ardor he searched the old files of the Youth's Companion and scanned the new copies as they came in week by week, so that he might hot lose one story of the hunter and the trapper, and with what care he laid aside one dime every seven days that he might buy Forest and Stream, and in imagination go afield with those more fortunate than he, to flush and to bag the plover, the quail, the woodcock, and the partridge. The sentimentalist remembers the days of his youth and all their natural delights.

But he can also recall traces, intimations, as Wordsworth would call them, of a nature hardly partaking of the same world. He can distinguish a remnant of pity in his reaction after peppering a young robin with sling-shot; he can at this moment remember the burning shame that consumed him when his first bird tumbled to the ground at his feet, and what a bitter meal it made. He can refresh the sensation, hardly perceptible in those eager and impatient days, of recoil at the apparent suffering of the fish being taken from the hook. These the sentimentalist can remember - the first stirrings of a changing sentiment, the beginnings of a different mood.

And now he has to confess that the former things have passed away, and that these intimations of aversion to recreation that entails distress have developed into a natural recoil at the sight of any suffering and into a keen delight at the thought or sight of fish or bird or beast enjoying natural freedom. The leisurely trout napping in the stone-bottomed pool