All this is something for a nation which has hardly pulled up the stumps out of its city market-places. It is sad to reflect that milliners, like Burgundy, are spoiled by transportation to the headquarters of American fashion. But as the best bonnet of the Empress's own artist would be exploded with yells a couple of seasons after the time when it was the rage, the Icarian professor's flight into the regions of rhetoric has not led him to any very logical resting-place from which he can look down on the aesthetic possibilities of New York or other Western cities emerging from the semi-barbarous state. We are not proud, of course, of any of the mechanical triumphs we have won; they are well enough, and show--to borrow the words of a distinguished American, whom, during his too brief career, we held unrivalled by any experimenter in the Old World for the depth as well as the daring of his investigations--that some things can be done as well as others. Our specialty is of somewhat larger scope. We profess to make men and women out of human beings better than any of the joint-stock companies called dynasties have done or can do it. We profess to make citizens out of men,--not _citoyens_, but persons educated to question all privileges asserted by others, and claim all rights belonging to themselves,--the only way in which the infinitely most important party to the compact between the governed and governing can avoid being cheated out of the best rights inherent in human nature, as an experience the world has seen almost enough of has proved. We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary _melanosis_, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it. When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the _materies morbi_,--and both these events are only matters of time,--perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners. If not, there will probably be refugees enough from the Old World, who have learned the fashions in courts, and will be glad to turn their knowledge to a profitable use for the benefit of their republican patronesses in New York and Boston. We have run away from our subject farther than we intended at starting; but an essay on legs could hardly avoid the rambling tendency which naturally belongs to these organs. * * * * * PAUL BLECKER. PART I. "Which serves life's purpose best, To enjoy or to renounce?"