erable sinners,' we should doubtless have sent over here the design
of some graceful penitential habit, which would give our places of
worship a much more appropriate air than they now have. As it is, it
would form a subject for such a court of inquiry and adaptation as we
have supposed, to draw a line between the costume of the theatre and the
church.

"In the same manner, there is a want of appropriateness in the costume
of our American women, who display in the street promenade a style of
dress and adornment originally intended for showy carriage drives in
such great exhibition grounds as the Bois de Boulogne. The makers of
Parisian fashions are not generally walkers. They do not, with all
their extravagance, have the bad taste to trail yards of silk and velvet
over the mud and dirt of a pavement, or promenade the street in a
costume so pronounced and striking as to draw the involuntary glance of
every eye; and the showy toilets displayed on the _pave_ by American
young women have more than once exposed them to misconstruction in the
eyes of foreign observers.

"Next to appropriateness, the second requisite to beauty in dress I take
to be unity of effect. In speaking of the arrangement of rooms in the
'House and Home Papers,' I criticised some apartments wherein were many
showy articles of furniture, and much expense had been incurred,
because, with all this, there was no _unity of result_. The carpet was
costly, and in itself handsome; the paper was also in itself handsome
and costly; the tables and chairs also in themselves very elegant; and
yet, owing to a want of any unity of idea, any grand harmonizing tint of
color, or method of arrangement, the rooms had a jumbled, confused air,
and nothing about them seemed particularly pretty or effective. I
instanced rooms where thousands of dollars had been spent, which,
because of this defect, never excited admiration; and others in which
the furniture was of the cheapest description, but which always gave
immediate and universal pleasure. The same rule holds good in dress. As
in every apartment, so in every toilet, there should be one ground tone
or dominant color, which should rule all the others, and there should be
a general style of idea to which everything should be subjected.

"We may illustrate the effect of this principle in a very familiar case.
It is generally conceded that the majority of women look better in
mourning than they do in their ordinary apparel;