ure. The
ladies here, whose hair was naturally made to fall around the shoulders,
reared it up on end; but in New Guinea, fashionables born with hair that
grew of its own will into an upright bush, preferred to cut it off, and
re-arrange it in a wig directed downwards. Sometimes they do no more than
crop it close; and then, since it is characteristic of the hair in this
race to grow, not in an expanse, but in tufts, the head is said by sailors
to remind them of a worn-out shoe-brush. So, at the Antipodes as well as
here, Art is an enemy to Nature. Hair upon the head was meant originally
to preserve in all seasons an equable temperature above the brain.
Emptying grease-pots into it, and matting it together, we convert it into
an unwholesome skull-cap.

The neck? Here sanitary people say, How satisfactory it is that Englishmen
keep their necks covered with a close cravat, and do not Byronize in
opposition to the climate. That is very good; but English women, who
account themselves more delicate, don't cover their necks, indeed they do
not at all times cover their shoulders. So traveling from top to toe, if
Englishmen wear thick shoes to protect the feet, our English women scorn
the weakness, and go, except a little fancy covering, bare-footed.

From this point I digress, to note of other garments that the English
dress, as now established, does on the whole fair credit to society. To
the good gentlemen who poetize concerning grace and the antique, who sigh
for togas, stolas, and paludaments, I say, Go to. The drapery you sigh for
was the baby-linen of the human race. Now we are out of long-clothes. The
present European dress is that which offers least impediment to action. It
shows what a Man is like, and that is more than any stranger from another
world could have detected under the upholstery to which our sculptors
cling. The merest hint of a man--shaped as God shaped him--is better than
ten miles of folded blanket. Artists cry down our costume; forgetting that
if they have not folds of drapery to paint, that is because they have in
each man every limb to which they may assign its posture. If they can put
no mind into a statue by the mastery of attitude, all the sheets in Guy's
Hospital will not twist into a fold that shall be worth their chiseling.

With women it is different. They have both moral and aesthetic right to
drapery; and for the fashion of it, we must leave that to themselves. They
are all licensed to deal