life is to keep up a false show of beauty after the true
bloom is wasted by dissipation. The woman who never goes to bed till
morning, who never even dresses herself, who never takes a needle in
her hand, who never goes to church, and never entertains one serious
idea of duty of any kind, when got up in Pompadour style, has, to say
the truth, the good taste and merit of appropriateness. Her dress
expresses just what she is,--all false, all artificial, all
meretricious and unnatural; no part or portion of her from which it
might be inferred what her Creator originally designed her to be.

"But when a nice little American girl, who has been brought up to
cultivate her mind, to refine her taste, to care for her health, to be
a helpful daughter and a good sister, to visit the poor and teach in
Sunday schools; when a good, sweet, modest little puss of this kind
combs all her pretty hair backward till it is one mass of frowsy
confusion; when she powders, and paints under her eyes; when she
adopts, with eager enthusiasm, every _outre_, unnatural fashion that
comes from the most dissipated foreign circles,--she is in bad taste,
because she does not represent either her character, her education, or
her good points. She looks like a second-rate actress, when she is, in
fact, a most thoroughly respectable, estimable, lovable little girl,
and on the way, as we poor fellows fondly hope, to bless some one of
us with her tenderness and care in some nice home in the future.

"It is not the fashion in America for young girls to have
waiting-maids,--in foreign countries it is the fashion. All this
meretricious toilet--so elaborate, so complicated, and so contrary to
nature--must be accomplished, and it is accomplished, by the busy
little fingers of each girl for herself; and so it seems to be very
evident that a style of hair-dressing which it will require hours to
disentangle, which must injure and in time ruin the natural beauty of
the hair, ought to be one thing which a well-regulated court of
inquiry would reject in our American fashions.

"Again, the genius of American life is for simplicity and absence of
ostentation. We have no parade of office: our public men wear no
robes, no stars, garters, collars, etc.; and it would, therefore, be
in good taste in our women to cultivate simple styles of dress. Now I
object to the present fashions, as adopted from France, that they are
flashy and theatrical. Having their origin with a commun