I have no more desire to define ugliness than I have daring to define
beauty; but still I would like to remind those who mock at beauty as
being an unpractical thing of this fact, that an ugly thing is merely a
thing that is badly made, or a thing that does not serve its purpose;
that ugliness is want of fitness; that ugliness is failure; that ugliness
is uselessness, such as ornament in the wrong place, while beauty, as
some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities. There is a
divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no
more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant; ugliness is a spendthrift
and wastes its material; in fine, ugliness--and I would commend this
remark to Mr. Wentworth Huyshe--ugliness, as much in costume as in
anything else, is always the sign that somebody has been unpractical. So
the costume of the future in England, if it is founded on the true laws
of freedom, comfort, and adaptability to circumstances, cannot fail to be
most beautiful also, because beauty is the sign always of the rightness
of principles, the mystical seal that is set upon what is perfect, and
upon what is perfect only.

As for your other correspondent, the first principle of dress that all
garments should be hung from the shoulders and not from the waist seems
to me to be generally approved of, although an 'Old Sailor' declares that
no sailors or athletes ever suspend their clothes from the shoulders, but
always from the hips. My own recollection of the river and running
ground at Oxford--those two homes of Hellenism in our little Gothic
town--is that the best runners and rowers (and my own college turned out
many) wore always a tight jersey, with short drawers attached to it, the
whole costume being woven in one piece. As for sailors it is true, I
admit, and the bad custom seems to involve that constant 'hitching up' of
the lower garments which, however popular in transpontine dramas, cannot,