unprofessional
toilet produces a sense of incongruity. A mode of dress may be in
perfect taste on the stage, that would be absurd in an evening party,
absurd in the street, absurd, in short, everywhere else.

"Now you come to my first objection to our present American toilet,--its
being to a very great extent _inappropriate_ to our climate, to our
habits of life and thought, and to the whole structure of ideas on which
our life is built. What we want, apparently, is some court of inquiry
and adaptation that shall pass judgment on the fashions of other
countries, and modify them to make them a graceful expression of our own
national character, and modes of thinking and living. A certain class of
women in Paris at this present hour makes the fashions that rule the
feminine world. They are women who live only for the senses, with as
utter and obvious disregard of any moral or intellectual purpose to be
answered in living as a paroquet or a macaw. They have no family ties;
love, in its pure domestic sense, is an impossibility in their lot;
religion in any sense is another impossibility; and their whole
intensity of existence, therefore, is concentrated on the question of
sensuous enjoyment, and that personal adornment which is necessary to
secure it. When the great, ruling country in the world of taste and
fashion has fallen into such a state that the virtual leaders of fashion
are women of this character, it is not to be supposed that the fashions
emanating from them will be of a kind well adapted to express the ideas,
the thoughts, the state of society, of a great Christian democracy such
as ours ought to be.

"What is called, for example, the Pompadour style of dress, so much in
vogue of late, we can see to be perfectly adapted to the kind of
existence led by dissipated women, whose life is one revel of
excitement; and who, never proposing to themselves any intellectual
employment or any domestic duty, can afford to spend three or four hours
every day under the hands of a waiting-maid, in alternately tangling and
untangling their hair. Powder, paint, gold-dust and silver-dust,
pomatums, cosmetics, are all perfectly appropriate where the ideal of
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 o