Our great alienist is very severe on the men of society as well, more especially for the manner in which they trim their beards. We cannot help sympathizing with men who wear a double-pointed beard when they are told that they are on the high road to lunacy because they ape Lucius Verrius, a gentleman whose portrait they have probably never seen. Such stigmata of folly could have been pointed out only by a man whose mind is completely devoid of a sense of the ridiculous. To anybody who has not a special point to prove at all cost, it will be patent that throughout the whole course of history educated men never dressed more soberly than now. In this matter English fashion governs the world, and the ruling ideas in Englishmen’s dress are durability, comfort, and adaptability to the occasions on which it is worn. Continental men may not adhere so strictly to these ideas, but there is good reason to believe that in a short time they will do so. Modern room and house decorations are, according to Nordau, so many indications of degeneration and decay. That there are many rooms and houses eccentrically furnished and decorated throughout the civilized world no one would deny. But compared with the number of houses and rooms chastely furnished and decorated in a manner which is incomparably more pleasant and attractive than the average rooms, especially in Germany and England thirty years ago, these abodes of eccentrics sink into insignificance. As to the decoration of public halls and places of amusement, we surely notice an improvement which could not point to degeneration. Hardly in any European town would such wall decorations be now permitted as disfigured the walls of public places of amusement and dancing-halls in Germany some thirty years ago—the Apollo Saal of Hamburg, to wit, the walls of which represented hell in the worst taste possible. Here, again, Nordau gives us no standard to go by. He does not tell us what the house or the room of a rational being should be like, or to what extent a wealthy man may indulge in a freak, or amuse his friends by grotesque furniture and bizarre decorations, without being degenerated. The enjoyments of society especially present symptoms which cause our psychologist to tremble for the sanity of the upper classes. Under this head, we expected him to say something of the increasing taste for healthy games and sport, for travel, and the amateur practice of the arts for amusement’s sake. Had he been willing to look at the question from both sides, he might have said something about the increasing love of science, especially social science; of good books as well as bad ones; of the high prices fetched by the paintings of the old masters, even those not belonging to the pre-Raphaelite period, consequently real works of art according to Nordau. He might have acknowledged the improved tone in social gatherings and the marked diminution in convivial drunkenness.