Just as Shakspeare poured out the unassorted jewels of his inexhaustible understanding—cut, uncut, precious, bogus, crude, contemptible and superb, all together, so Nature prodigally lavishes her largess of color. I am not sure that Shakspeare did not teach her the trick. Let the ladies, profiting by her bounty, emulate her virtues and avoid her vice, each having due regard to her own kind of beauty, and taking thought for its fitting embellishment and display. Let them not permit the neutral-tinted minds of the “subdued-color” fiends to fray them with utterance of feeble platitude. An intolerable deal of nonsense has been uttered, too, about the heartlessness of fashionable women in wearing the plumage of song-birds—and all women are fashionable, and therefore “heartless,” whom fortune has favored with means to that end. It is conceded by those who utter the nonsense that it does no good; and that fact alone would make it nonsense if the lack of wisdom did not inhere in its every proposition. No doubt the offending female is herself somewhat punctured in the conscience of her as she goes beautifuling herself with the “starry plumes” which “expanded shine with azure, green and gold,” and remembers the unchristian censure entailed by her passion for this manner of headgear. If so, let her take comfort in this present assurance that she is only obeying an imperious mandate of her nature, which is also a universal law. To be comely in the eyes of the male—that is the end and justification of her being, and she knows it. Moreover, to the task of its accomplishment she brings an intelligence distinctly superior to that with which we judge the result. We may say that we don’t like her to have a fledged head; and that may be true enough: our error consists in thinking that this is the same proposition as that we don’t like her with her head fledged. Clearly, we do: we like her better with her feathers than without, and shall continue to prefer her that way as long as she is likely to hold the feathers in service; then we shall again like her better without them, even as we liked her better with them. The lesson whereof is that what are called the “caprices” of fashion have an underlying law as constant as that of gravitation.