lady, which is loose round the limb and tight at the ankle.

The 'Girl Graduate,' with a pathos to which I am not insensible, entreats
me not to apotheosise 'that awful, befringed, beflounced, and bekilted
divided skirt.' Well, I will acknowledge that the fringes, the flounces,
and the kilting do certainly defeat the whole object of the dress, which
is that of ease and liberty; but I regard these things as mere wicked
superfluities, tragic proofs that the divided skirt is ashamed of its own
division. The principle of the dress is good, and, though it is not by
any means perfection, it is a step towards it.

Here I leave the 'Girl Graduate,' with much regret, for Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe. Mr. Huyshe makes the old criticism that Greek dress is unsuited
to our climate, and, to me the somewhat new assertion, that the men's
dress of a hundred years ago was preferable to that of the second part of
the seventeenth century, which I consider to have been the exquisite
period of English costume.

Now, as regards the first of these two statements, I will say, to begin
with, that the warmth of apparel does not depend really on the number of
garments worn, but on the material of which they are made. One of the
chief faults of modern dress is that it is composed of far too many
articles of clothing, most of which are of the wrong substance; but over
a substratum of pure wool, such as is supplied by Dr. Jaeger under the
modern German system, some modification of Greek costume is perfectly
applicable to our climate, our country and our century. This important
fact has already been pointed out by Mr. E. W. Godwin in his excellent,
though too brief, handbook on Dress, contributed to the Health
Exhibition. I call it an important fact because it makes almost any form
of lovely costume perfectly practicable in our cold climate. Mr. Godwin,