As to dress, that, as a man, I must regard as a purely adventitious and an essentially unimportant matter. If a woman be beautiful, or charming without actual beauty, a man cares very little in what she is dressed, so long as she seems at ease in her clothes, and their color is becoming to her and harmonious. There is no greater mistake than the assumption that being dressed in good taste is indicative of good breeding, of education, or of social advantage of any kind. Nor is it even a sign of good taste in any other particular. You shall see a woman who has come out of the slums, and whose life is worthy of her origin and her breeding, although it may have become gilded and garish, and she shall dress herself daily, morning, noon, and night, with such an exquisite sense of fitness in all things, with such an instinctive appreciation of harmony of outline and color, that your eye will be soothed with the sight of her apparel; and she shall nevertheless be vulgar in mind and manners, sordid in soul, in her life equally gross and frivolous. And the converse is no less true. Women most happy in the circumstances of their birth and breeding, intelligent, cultivated, charming, of whose sympathy in regard to anything good or beautiful you may be sure, will dress themselves in such an incongruous, heterogeneous fashion that the beauty which they often possess triumphs with difficulty over their effort to adorn it. I feel, therefore, that I am saying very little against Englishwomen when I say that in general they are the worst dressed human creatures that I ever saw, except perhaps the female half of a certain class of Germans. The reputation that they have in this respect among Frenchwomen and "Americans" is richly deserved. Good taste is simply absent. The notion of fitness, congruity, and "concatenation accordingly" does not exist. In form the Englishwoman's dress is dowdy, in color frightful. If not color-blind, she seems generally to be blind to the effect of color, either singly or in combination. At the Birmingham festival I saw a lady in a rich red-purple (plum color) silk--high around the neck of course, as it was morning--and over this swept a necklace of enormous coral beads. It made one's eyes ache to look at her. This was not an uncommon, but a characteristic instance. Such combinations may be justly regarded as the rule in Englishwomen's dress. For purple they have strong liking. They not only wear it in gowns, but they use it for trimming, in bands and flounces, in ribbons, in feathers. They combine it with all other colors. An Englishwoman seems to think herself "made" if she can deck herself in some way with purple silk or velvet, or ribbons or feathers. Of course I am excepting from these remarks a few who have intuitive good taste, and other few who employ French _modistes_, and who submit implicitly to their authority. The latter condition is essential; for even when the main