What! will you up and follow the first piper that leads you down Petticoat Lane, there, on a Sabbath, to gather, for the week, from the dull rags of ages wherewith to bedeck yourselves? that, beneath your travestied awkwardness, we have trouble to find your own dainty selves? Oh, fie! Is the world, then, exhausted? and must we go back because the thumb of the mountebank jerks the other way?
Costume is not dress.
And the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste!
For by what authority shall these be pretty masters? Look well, and nothing have they invented—nothing put together for comeliness' sake.
Haphazard from their shoulders hang the garments of the hawker—combining in their person the motley of many manners with the medley of the mummers' closet.
Set up as a warning, and a finger-post of danger, they point to the disastrous effect of Art upon the middle classes.
Why this lifting of the brow in deprecation of the present—this pathos in reference to the past?
If Art be rare to-day, it was seldom heretofore.
It is false, this teaching of decay.
The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs—a monument of isolation—hinting at sadness—having no part in the progress of his fellow men.