The "Girl Graduate," with a pathos to which I am not insensible,
entreats me not to apotheosize "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