[Footnote 8: We are greatly multiplying artists, by "the promise to the ear," and by our Art-Unions; whether we are like to have such returns to the Commissioners of the Income-tax as those we have quoted, as a consequence of our forced and hot-bed encouragement, remains to be seen. Lord Brougham objects to the railroad mania, on account of the beggary to be induced when the employment they give rise to is over. When the ferment of patronage shall again have settled down to a selection of a few favourites, may we not entertain somewhat similar fears?] AESTHETICS OF DRESS. No. IV. MINOR MATTERS. It is not to be supposed that a man is to be styled "dressed" when he has only got a proper coat on his back; something more than this is necessary ere he can claim a place in the _beau monde_, or can decently figure in a _bal pare_. There is no one, indeed, but your mere Hottentot, who considers himself the pink of fashion solely from the fact of throwing something, more or less becoming, over his shoulders; though, by the way, we once heard of a negro chief who, in a state of unclad majesty, clapped a gold-laced cocked-hat on his head, and then strutted about with an air of intense satisfaction at the result of his habilimentary effort. He was not a well-dressed man this chief, any more than our friend the Frenchman in the diligence; but we will tell you this aesthetic story, gentle reader. It was our destiny once--as it has been, too, of many a son of perfidious Albion--to be journeying across the monotonous plains of Upper Burgundy, _en route_ for the gay capital. 'Twas a summer morn, and the breezy call of the incense-breathing lady, as Gray the poet calls her, came delightfully upon our heated forehead, as we pushed down the four-paned rattling window of that clumsy typefication of slowness, misnamed a diligence, to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the _rotonde_. Our fellow-travellers consisted of a couple of greasy, black-haired, sallow-faced cures, two farmers' wives with a puking child each, our own portly self, and the sixth passenger. Now, this sixth individual, who was in reality the eighth Christian immured in this quasi Black-hole, was one of those nondescript Parisian existences, to define whom is almost impossible to those who have never witnessed the animal. He might have been a _commis-voyageur_, or a clerk in the passport-office, or the keeper of a small cafe, or an _epicier_, but he did not look stupid enough for the last. Be this as it may, he was short rather than tall, lean rather than fat,--in a shabby brown surtout--smoked and took snuff--had been in Dauphine--thought the Germans a set of European Chinese--considered a national guard as the model of a good soldier--kept spitting out of the window from time to time--stretched his legs most inconveniently against ours--tied his head up at dark in a dirty bird's-eye blue cotton _mouchoir-de-poche_, and snored throughout the night.