ch do not show the least taste in their
apparel. Many of them send to Paris for their dresses, and pay sums,
which make one's mouth water, to be dressed in the latest fashion; but I
fancy that the French _modistes_ manufacture a certain style of attire
for the Australian taste, just as the French merchants manufacture
clarets for the Australian market. It is a compound of the _cocotte_
and the American. Nor when she has got a handsome dress does the
Melbourne _grande dame_ know how to wear it; she merely succeeds in
looking what a Brighton lodging-house keeper once defined to me as a
'carriage-lady.' A lady of the English upper middle-class dressed by a
London milliner looks infinitely better.

There are some costumes worn by Victorian ladies which you will never see
worn by any other ladies; but for all that, the middle and even the lower
class am by no means destitute of ideas about dress. Compare the
Melbourne with the Birmingham or Manchester factory girl, or the young
lady in a Collins Street retail establishment with the shop-girl in any
but the most aristocratic part of London; the old country will come out
second-best. And why is it? It is no easy question to answer; at the
bottom is undoubtedly that general love of display, which is almost as
characteristic of Melbourne as it is of Paris. But then what is the cause
of that? And a love of display, though it may be and is amongst the
wealthy productive of grand dresses, as it is of grand dinners and grand
furniture, does not make taste--e.g., the Second Empire; and though it
would be going too far to say that the ladies of Melbourne dress
tastefully, it is within the truth to give them credit for a tendency
towards taste. Throughout England the middle and lower classes dress
hideously. Why should the first generation of Victorians show a
disposition to abandon the ugly? I leave it to some aesthetic philosopher
to find out the reason, and content myself with noting the fact. If I
wanted to moralize, I have little doubt that the drapers' and milliners'
accounts of these 'young ladies' would furnish a redundant text, and
that, although a large number of them make up their dresses themselves
from paper patterns or illustrations in _Myra's Journal_. How they can
afford to dress as well as they do, they and their mothers best know; but
the bow here and the flower there are not costly things, and the mere
fact of being able to cut out a dress so as not to look dowdy show