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says, to see me fine;" at one time he had not grudged a hundred guineas for a dress. She knows she sells a dress a great bargain at twenty guineas, and lace at fifteen. By the end of the piece we are so up in her wardrobe, and so possessed by the importance of appearances under every circumstance of life, that we realise the extremity of her despair, when dying in the sponging-house, on finding that she had not sent for laces to replace the cut ones; and feel an added reverence for her purity when we see her kneeling on the dark floor in white damask, her white-flowing robes, for she had no hoop, illuminating the dingy corners; and her linen beyond imagination white, considering where she was, and how long she had been there.

All this represents the feeling about clothes in the last century. It belonged to the views of the period to treat them seriously; and it could hardly be otherwise, for they imposed on society the severest discipline it had to undergo, and were for ever inflicting painful lessons of self- restraint. How seriousness hung about the subject beyond these buckram days we learn from the inimitable pen of George Eliot. Who can forget the solemn, treblylocked seclusion of Mrs Pullet's best bonnet, or Mrs Glegg's virtuous boast of having better lace in her drawers than ever she had on! so coldly free from vanity as to forget the idea of dress as adornment, and resolving all into a sense of property and calm self-esteem. And in more genial natures than Mrs Glegg's there often exists an intense appreciation of fine clothes with the most innocent indifference to the question of the becoming. There are women who pique themselves on being judges of quality and texture, and who like costly shawls and furs, and to stand on end in rich silks, and yet have never thought whether the colour suits their complexion, and only care to

have their clothes admired, not themselves in them. The natural instinct thus severed from its use, which is to set off and individualise the person, was to be seen in full force in the days of plain Quakerism. The fair Friend was forbidden all exercise of fancy; no "latitude in apparel," as it was quaintly called, no choice in form or colour, was allowed her; every hem and border was under a law. The Quaker child was gravely counselled to cut off the tassel on her boot, to which she clung in desperation, and promised "peace in so doing;' but the passion cropped out all the same, and found scope in expense, in finest lawns and richest silks, and many of them. And this suggests two remarks: one, that wherever taste is checked love of mere expense comes in-as the London citizens' wives once lined their grogram gowns with the velvet they were forbidden to wear outside; and the other, that wherever women are educated with ultra strictness in matters of dress, and forbidden any exercise of their own will and fancy in this sphere, they will as they grow up find some other and larger field of independence. The daughter who has never been allowed to have a dress in the fashion will defy her father and mother in the question of religion, and choose a faith for herself, if she may not dictate the shape of a sleeve. This is so conspicuously the case in the Quaker sect, that it is notorious the women in their plain garb have ever taken the spiritual conduct and the preaching of the Society entirely into their own hands, and utterly quenched the men. If they were circumscribed in skirts and flounces, at least they would be "very large in the ministry," and so indemnify themselves.

There are two sorts of love of dress in the full sense of the word— one taste, the other passion; and these act on precisely opposite principles. That passion for dress, which is at once the expression of

and stimulus to vanity, tends to all manner of illusions pervading all classes:-in the first place, to preposterous, superstitious faith in its efficacy. Passion for dress leads to the ignoring of all unpalatable truths; it blinds a woman to her own defects, and constantly betrays her into parading them; it deadens her to the harmony of things, and tempts the old and plain into humiliating selfcomparison with youth and grace, deluding them into the notion that dress makes the beauty-that the cowl does make the monk. This it is that tempts the poor into rivalry with the rich; into bedizening themselves with tawdry frippery-content with the barest seeming and rudest imitation; into spending their small means on the merest outside show. And in all cases passion for dress of this nature is excited and kept alive by a mistaken view, often fatally mistaken, as to the objects to be pleased and attracted by the display; so that we might almost say that no woman will be too fine or in any marked degree unsuitably attired who is right in the eyes she wishes to satisfy, and who confines herself to her legitimate sphere of attraction. Taste in dress, on the contrary, can scarcely lead its possessor astray, and is indeed a moral guide. It is full of reminders and admonitions; nor can a woman dress herself in perfect taste without a distinct knowledge of her personal defects. A hundred fashions are pretty and charming in themselves, but she knows they are not for her, and resists them. They are forbid den by something in figure, complexion, station, age, or character, which, though not flattering to her vanity, she does not permit herself to forget. Passion for dress is profuse and extravagant; taste in dress is full of wise, philosophical economies, knowing that the merit of decoration is not in its elaborate richness or expense, but in its adaptation. Taste in dress is essentially moderate and self-collected; never

forgetting that the object of dress is not to exhibit itself but its wearer; that all that the most splendid toilet has to do is to set off a noble, graceful, and winning presence, and itself to be lost in a pleasing or effective, or, it may be, dazzling general impression. Passion for dress is always intent on what others will think-on taking some new eye by storm; taste has self-respect, and, before all things, must satisfy its own notions of propriety and grace.

With all these limitations and reservations dress has still its wonders to boast of. Sometimes it would seem that its more marked triumphs must be sought for in past historic ages, when poets, essayists, or chroniclers dazzle our imaginations with garments which must have been gifted with the powers of Venus's girdle, and so have lifted their wearers out of humanity. It does not often fall to our lot to see miracles of dress, or what our neighbours call ravishing toilets, effecting their proper work of transformation. But such an achievement has been performed quite lately and on the noblest scale. Any one who can recall the journalist's first coldblooded description of Maria Pia, the young Queen of Portugal, as he unflinchingly noted down every homely point of face and feature, and admitted how little favoured by nature was this young princess; and subsequently read his vivid description of her presentation as queen, such as he saw her from the illuminated square of Turin when she sat in state in the balcony of the Royal Armoury, must own the mystic power of dress, and the adjuncts of which dress is the chief principle. "There seated in state," he wrote, "white-robed, bejewelled, beflowered, with a high diamond crown-a genuine queen's crownon her head; the delicate orangeblossoms gracefully interlacing with the richest gems of the diadem:-for two or three hours was the timid princess, the girl of sweet fifteen,

made to exhibit herself to those hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes throughout the long ordeal; serene, composed, every inch a queen, beautiful in that moment with her native grace and modesty, beaming with incipient, instinctive, halfconscious happiness." This is what dress and the consciousness of splendour can do for sweet fifteen, a pale, fair cheek, and a graceful form; and when we read of the heroines of antiquity, the dazzling gleaming beauties of the past, we may know something of the secret of their lustre from what produces it in modern days.

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But let not our fair readers suppose that we attach only to a magnificent 'get up" these magic powers. If splendour can now and then work wonders, neatness constantly achieves triumphs as real though less dazzling. No woman (unless she be indeed a Mrs Conrady, one of those exceptions which prove the rule) strikes us as hopelessly plain if her dress is irreproachable. There is, we believe, a close connection between such homely virtues as cleanliness or order, and taste in its highest meaning. The eye that cannot bear the smallest hole or rent, or spot or crease, has taste by nature, or presently acquires it. We cannot think of a neat toilet but it suggests well-chosen colour, and material which has the most important of all qualities in material -a good hang; and this we see as often in a well-fitting cotton gown as in anything else. Wit ness the pretty modest costume of our housemaids and parlour-maids, or at least the more estimable and sensible of that sisterhood. Neatness is the conscience of the toilet; it keeps jealous watch over little things, and is nice rather in the cause of self- respect than to attract other eyes, though we believe no charm is more felt by the observer, or is accepted so much as a reflection and index of the wear

er's hidden graces. Neatness, too, is unselfish and free from the rivalries and jealousies which so often characterise love of show and effect. The lady always delicately and poetically neat would have every woman she can influence as trim and pure as herself; while the lover of fine clothes aims at being, wherever she goes, the best dressed woman of the company.

But we must hasten to a conclusion. Our subject is apt, we think, to be treated in a conventional spirit. Uninspired wisdom has always been hard upon fine clothes, and we think, as regarding dress from a narrow and prejudiced point of view, takes a different line towards it than we can detect in Scripture, which surely recognises attire as the fit natural exponent of rank, condition, and character. It is a case for fair liberty of private judgment. No man has a right to prescribe a repulsive, disfiguring, or mean costume to his dependants: no woman, defiant of fashion in her own person, and dressed in a little brief authority as lady of the manor, has a right to prescribe the cut of her own protesting garments on the women around her who have no state and no manor to fall back upon; and if they are denied taste, independence of choice, and conformity to custom in this direction, lose the only field the world offers for satisfaction in their possessions. There is no necessary connection between a bit of bright colour-that delightful scarlet that lightens up the landscape — and vanity; and, as we have said, if a woman will mainly seek to please father and mother, brothers, sisters, friends, lover, or husband, she will not be too gay or pleasant to look upon for her own wellbeing and best interests, however bright, pretty, or charming she may make herself by adorning herself in modest apparel under the teaching of a refined and cultivated taste.

"MIRA colui con quella spada in mano Che vièn dinanzi a' tre, sì come sire: Quegli è Omero poeta sovrano,"

is Virgil's address to Dante in the nether world, as he directs his eye towards the lordly presence of Homer, towering, sword in hand, above his three attendant bards. He, on whom the parent of modern song gazed at Virgil's bidding with reverent awe as his own remote intellectual ancestor; as the father of poetry, the

"Signor dell' altissimo canto Che sovra gli altri, com' aquila, vola;"

has met from generation to generation with the common fate of real greatness to be admired and to be misunderstood. Not to speak of how little his own countrymen in later and more artificial times entered into his spirit when they allegorised his simple strains and imported into them meanings never intended by himself-not to dwell on the manner in which he was travestied by his Latin imitators-we (looking nearer home) can point to neither of the standard English translations of Homer with satisfaction as faithful to his spirit; to one of the two only as faithful to him in letter.

Great as is the pleasure conveyed to most minds by Pope's highsounding verse and never-flagging spirit, he is as little to be relied on for a faithful representation of the feelings and spirit of Homer's age as is Racine himself. Pope's defective scholarship made him depend largely on a French translation; and his guide and he have contrived to let many of the most refined beauties and most characteristic touches of their great original escape them.

Cowper is much more literal, but

infinitely less poetical in his translation than Pope.

The scholars of England have therefore long felt that there is a fair field open to those who wish to do honour to Dante's "Sovereign Poet," and a great prize for them to win; and we have seen of late not a few duly-qualified champions stand forth to break a lance therein.

The book now before us endeavours to supply the want to which so many tentative efforts have pointed. And, so far as we know, there is but little diversity of opinion as to Lord Derby's success in the undertaking.

It is indeed a high gratification to see the great leader of the Conservative party employing his brief leisure from political strife in presenting to his countrymen the strains of the most ancient of poets, in imperishable English verse ;using his own great and varied experience of life to set before us worthily that bard who, more than any, requires other qualities besides scholarship in his interpreter; who sang of human life in all its forms; of men's sports as well as of their earnest; of camp and council; of the fierce joy of battle and the arts of peace. Most of all, perhaps, is it delightful to hear the winged words of Ulysses or of Nestor, the fierce debates of Agamemnon and Achilles, repeated to us by the lips of our greatest living orator; to have the vigour of Homer's language echoed back to us by that eloquence whose force has often held listening senators breathless; his minutest shades of meaning reproduced to us with that precision and finished neatness of expression, which have so often won their admiration. Scholars (who to enjoy

Pope must forget Homer) will delight in Lord Derby's accuracy. The English public, which yawned over Cowper, will rejoice to find that a translation can keep close to its original and yet not be dull; and that no extraneous tinsel is required to set off Homer's great and varied beauties.

We called our readers' attention a few months ago to the judgment of our greatest living poet on the fittest form of English verse into which to translate the Iliad: a judgment which, it will be remembered, was conveyed in an example likely to prove much more persuasive than any number of precepts. When we did so, we were far from anticipating the signal confirmation which that judgment was to receive, so soon after, from the work before us. The perusal of a hundred lines of Lord Derby's version would be sufficient to convince the most sceptical that, if previous translations in blank verse have failed, the fault has not been in the weapon, but in the arm that wielded it.

His preface sets forth, in these few convincing sentences, the theory which he goes on to illustrate so admirably by his practice. "In the progress of this work I have been more and more confirmed in the opinion which I expressed at its commencement, that (whatever may be the extent of my own individual failure), 'if justice is ever to be done to the easy flow and majestic simplicity of the grand old poet, it can only be in the heroic blank verse.' I have seen isolated passages admirably rendered in other metres;

but the blank verse appears to me the only metre capable of adapting itself to all the gradations, if I may use the term, of the Homeric style; from the finished poetry of the nu

* Preface. + As in

merous similes, in which every touch is nature, and nothing is over-coloured or exaggerated, down to the simple, almost homely, style of some portions of the narrative. Least of all can any other metre do full justice to the spirit and freedom of the various speeches in which the old warriors give utterance, without disguise or restraint, to all their strong and genuine emotions. To subject these to the trammels of couplet and rhyme would be as destructive of their chief characteristics as the application of a similar process to the 'Paradise Lost' of Milton, or the tragedies of Shakespeare."* To our mind there can be no question that these are sound principles ;that in rendering an epic into English, great regard should be had to the metre of the greatest epic poem in our language; that in translating the speeches of a poet who represents character so dramatically as Homer does, great regard should be had to the example of Shakespeare. Indeed we should not have been displeased had the noble translator followed that example farther, and frequently mixed hendecasyllables with the ordinary decasyllabic Iambics. Such an intermixture is a great defence against monotony, and a source of new and varied musical combinations.

On the prior question, whether the translator of the Iliad is at liberty to choose a metre by reason of the metre of his original being incapable of reproduction in English, we have once before expressed an opinion, which we see no reason to change. And we cannot resist quoting Lord Derby's most emphatic protest against what he calls "that' pestilent heresy' of the socalled English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be