the other Gothic, but because each of them is the best method of
spanning a certain-sized opening, or resisting a certain weight.
The fact, however, that this dress was generally worn in England
two centuries and a half ago shows at least this, that the right
laws of dress have been understood and realized in our country, and
so in our country may be realized and understood again. As regards
the absolute beauty of this dress and its meaning, I should like to
say a few words more. Mr. Wentworth Huyshe solemnly announces that
"he and those who think with him" cannot permit this question of
beauty to be imported into the question of dress; that he and those
who think with him take "practical views on the subject," and so
on. Well, I will not enter here into a discussion as to how far
any one who does not take beauty and the value of beauty into
account can claim to be practical at all. The word practical is
nearly always the last refuge of the uncivilized. Of all misused
words it is the most evilly treated. But what I want to point out
is that beauty is essentially organic; that is, it comes, not from
without, but from within, not from any added prettiness, but from
the perfection of its own being; and that consequently, as the body
is beautiful, so all apparel that rightly clothes it must be
beautiful also in its construction and in its lines.

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 it 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