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Some of the best-dressed women in artistic and musical circles design their clothes wholly to suit their personal appearance, with such success that their independence of the prevailing mode of large or small hats or sleeves, striped or checked fabrics, etc., wins universal admiration. Remember that a dress or a hat is never a "creation" in itself. The wearer must always be considered.
Gauze fabrics, which displayed rather than concealed the figure, and silken clothing began to displace the old woollen dresses among women and even among men. Against the insane extravagance in the employment of foreign perfumery the sumptuary laws interfered in vain. But the real focus in which the brilliance of this genteel life was concentrated was the table.
Not that they confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is one of the smallest of the slaveholders a mere ten-bale man.
He showed me innumerable packages of ribbons, and other silk manufactures, and all sorts of silks, from the raw thread to the finest fabrics. He then offered to show me some of the curiosities of old London, and took me first to Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in Monkwell Street. It was at this place that the first anatomical studies were instituted in England.
When I consider the face of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of her cities; the useful magnificence of her spacious high-roads and bridges; the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations, opening the conveniences of maritime communication through a solid continent of so immense an extent; when I turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before my view the number of her fortifications, constructed with so bold and masterly a skill, and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when I recollect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what complete perfection the culture of many of the best productions of the earth have been brought in France; when I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her orators, sacred and profane; I behold in all this something which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure, and which demands that we should very seriously examine, what and how great are the latent vices that could authorize us at once to level so specious a fabric with the ground.
Wherefore rejoice, ye Continentals, and be thankful, and visit the Nassauese, bringing beef, butter, and beauty, bringing a few French muslins to replace the coarse English fabrics, and buxom Irish girls to outwork the idle negro women, bringing new books, newspapers, and periodicals, bringing the Yankee lecturer, all expenses paid, and his drink found him.
Its numerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer's level rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles up the huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled with sentimental remorse or poetical misgivings.
A deacon of the church went to him, and informed him that the umu was ready, and he came slowly toward us. He wore a white pareu of the ancient tapa, and a white tiputa, a poncho of the same beaten-bark fabrics. His head was crowned with ti-leaves, and in his hand he had a wand of the same. He was in the dim light a vision of the necromancer of medieval books.
Where culture was more advanced, as in Greece and parts of Italy, she looked to introduce, and no doubt succeeded in introducing, the best of her own productions, fabrics of crimson, violet, and purple, painted vases, embossed paterae, necklaces, bracelets, rings "cunning work" of all manner of kinds mirrors, glass vessels, and smelling-bottles.
The contemporary world confessed that in many fabrics the Hollanders were at the head of mankind. Dutch linen, manufactured of the flax grown on their own fields or imported from the obedient provinces, was esteemed a fitting present for kings to make and to receive. The name of the country had passed into the literature of England as synonymous with the delicate fabric itself.
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