So that in looking about and finding the whole of human society “hooked, and buttoned up and held together by clothes,” we cannot hope in any successful way to investigate the matter, if we forget for a moment that the dress of women is to be looked at as a subjective element. Going a little way with logical analysis, and agreeing, for example, that “if the cut betoken intellect and talent, so does color betoken temper and heart,” we soon meet with a mountain height of contradictions introduced by the purely personal effect of woman herself, and we find, long before attaining any symmetry of information, that woman has invested certain material elements of life, as she has invested so many elements of life that are not material, with the interest she herself has for us. A little lace, a ribbon she has worn in her hair, a glove, a satin slipper, a fan, a shred of trimming, have an eloquence in their revelation of her, a fragrance in their transmission of her touch, which eludes logic and confounds investigation. By a faculty and privilege of making things seem reasonable that are not at all reasonable, by a witchcraft, a sophistry of fashion, a trick of illusion, in the presence of which we forget every rule of art, every principle of proportion, every prejudice of habit, she can utterly bewilder us in a master stroke of invincible instinct. She takes, deliberately and with exquisite selective tact, certain entirely simple, inoffensive elements,--things which in themselves you must acknowledge to be harmless and almost rational; she takes these simple elements and she puts them together by a method, and in a manner, of which no man, if he lived to be one hundred and eighty-six, ever would discover the secret, and, waving her wizard wand over the entire mess, she calls it a hat! Nothing could be more preposterous, of course. When we study the thing as an object separated from her, it might, even though we knew that she had created it, excite our derision. But when we see this masterpiece of absurdity upon her head, that which had seemed at once an offence to nature and to art, the acme of decorative nonsense, immediately becomes forgivable--immediately becomes right. It is not that we excuse it for her sake. It is not that the apposition dismays our reason. We bow to it, accept it, and end by perceiving that, whether it be taken as an old fact of nature or a new fact of genius, it is unanswerable. [Illustration]