s
natural taste. It is the rarest of sights to see a real Melbourne girl
look dowdy. Her taste sometimes runs riot: it is exuberant, and becomes
vulgar and flash; but even then the vulgarity and flashness are of a
superior type to those of her equals across the ocean.

Sydney and Adelaide are distinctly superior to English towns of the same
size in the matter of apparel; but they will not bear comparison with
Melbourne. On the other hand, gorgeous and flash dresses are very rare in
the smaller cities. If they have not the talent of Melbourne, neither do
they share its blots. They go along at a steady jog-trot, and are content
to take their fashions second-hand from Melbourne, but with
modifications. Their more correct and sober taste will not tolerate even
many of the extravagances of which London is guilty--such extravagances,
for instance, as the Tam O'Shanter cap, which was warmly taken up in
Melbourne. But with all this good sense, they remain dowdy.

I have said nothing hitherto of married ladies' dress. When a colonial
girl marries, she considers herself, except in rare instances, on the
shelf, and troubles herself very little about what she wears. As a rule,
she has probably too many other things to take up her time. She has got a
husband, and what more can she want? He rarely cares what she has on, as
soon as the honeymoon is over. There is no one else to please, and I fear
that colonial girls are not of those who dress merely for themselves;
they like to be admired, and they appreciate the value of dress from a
flirtation point of view. Their taste is rather the outcome of a desire
to please others than of a sense of aesthetics. It is relative, and not
absolute. When once the finery has served its purpose, they are ready to
renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. And if the
moralist says that this argues some laxness of ideas before marriage, let
him remember that it is equally indicative of connubial bliss. Once
married, her flirtations are at an end--'played out,' if I may use the
term.

In another respect the Victorian is the direct opposite of the
_Parisienne_. If you leave general effects, and come to pull her dress
to pieces, you find that the metal is only electro, to whatever rank of
life she may belong. The general appearance may be pleasing, but in
detail she is execrable. Not but that the materials of her dress are rich
enough, so that my electro simile will hardly hold water; but