Our wives--bless them!--occasionally treat us to a few bewildering terms, hoping by their gossamer knowledge to present to our gaze a mental picture of a new, adorable, ardently desired--hat. Perhaps those nine proverbial tailors who go to make the one proverbial man, least of his sex, might, by a strenuous effort, confine the history of clothes during this reign into a compact literature of forty volumes. It would be indecent, as undecorous as the advertisements in ladies' papers, to attempt to fathom the language of the man who endeavoured to read the monumental effigy to the vanity of human desire for adornment. But is it adornment? Nowadays to be dressed well is not always the same thing as to be well dressed. Often it is far from it. The question of modern clothes is one of great perplexity. It seems that what is beauty one year may be the abomination of desolation the next, because the trick of that beauty has become common property. You puff your hair at the sides, you are in the true sanctum of the mode; you puff your hair at the sides, you are for ever utterly cast out as one having no understanding. I shall not attempt to explain it: it passes beyond the realms of explanation into the pure air of Truth. The Truth is simple. Aristocracy being no longer real, but only a cult, one is afraid of one's servants. Your servant puffs her hair at the sides, and, hang it! she becomes exactly like an aristocrat. Our servant having dropped her _g's_ for many years as well as her _h's_, it behoved us to pronounce our _g's_ and our _h's_. Our servants having learned our English, it became necessary for us to drop our _g's_; we seem at present unwilling in the matter of the _h_, but that will come. To cut the cackle and come to the clothes-horse, let me say that the bunglement of clothes which passes all comprehension in King George IV.'s reign is best explained by my cuttings from the book of one who apparently knew. Let the older writer have his, or her, fling in his, or her, words. 'CUROSY REMARKS ON THE LAST NEW FASHIONS. 'The City of London is now, indeed, most splendid in its buildings and extent; London is carried into the country; but never was it more deserted. 'A very, very few years ago, and during the summer, the dresses of the wives and daughters of our opulent tradesmen would furnish subjects for the investigators of fashion. 'Now, if those who chance to remain in London take a day's excursion of about eight or ten miles distance from the Metropolis, they hear the innkeepers deprecating the steamboats, by which they declare they are almost ruined: on Sundays, which would sometimes bring them the clear profits of ten or twenty pounds, they now scarce produce ten shillings.