strange dark spots,
and crimson patterns that you knew not of--spots of the inextinguishable
red that all the seas cannot wash away; yes, and among the pleasant
flowers that crown your fair heads, and glow on your wreathed hair, you
would see that one weed was always twisted which no one thought of--the
grass that grows on graves.

54. It was not, however, this last, this clearest and most appalling
view of our subject, that I intended to ask you to take this evening;
only it is impossible to set any part of the matter in its true light,
until we go to the root of it. But the point which it is our special
business to consider is, not whether costliness of dress is contrary to
charity; but whether it is not contrary to mere worldly wisdom: whether,
even supposing we knew that splendour of dress did not cost suffering or
hunger, we might not put the splendour better in other things than
dress. And, supposing our mode of dress were really graceful or
beautiful, this might be a very doubtful question; for I believe true
nobleness of dress to be an important means of education, as it
certainly is a necessity to any nation which wishes to possess living
art, concerned with portraiture of human nature. No good historical
painting ever yet existed, or ever can exist, where the dresses of the
people of the time are not beautiful: and had it not been for the lovely
and fantastic dressing of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries,
neither French, nor Florentine, nor Venetian art could have risen to
anything like the rank it reached. Still, even then, the best dressing
was never the costliest; and its effect depended much more on its
beautiful and, in early times, modest, arrangement, and on the simple
and lovely masses of its colour, than on gorgeousness of clasp or
embroidery.

55. Whether we can ever return to any of those more perfect types of
form, is questionable; but there can be no more question that all the
money we spend on the forms of dress at present worn, is, so far as any
good purpose is concerned, wholly lost. Mind, in saying this, I reckon
among good purposes the purpose which young ladies are said sometimes
to entertain--of being married; but they would be married quite as soon
(and probably to wiser and better husbands) by dressing quietly, as by
dressing brilliantly: and I believe it would only be needed to lay
fairly and largely before them the real good which might be effected by
the sums they spend i