gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic.  But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.  Inexpressive of what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they are neither implicitly nor explicitly good raiment.  It is hardly possible to err by violence in denouncing them.  Why, when an indifferent writer is praised for “clothing his thought,” it is to modern raiment that one’s agile fancy flies—­fain of completing the metaphor!

The human scenery:  yes, costume could make a crowd something other than the mass of sooty colour—­dark without depth—­and the multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and meet, and listen to the speaker.  For the undistinguished are very important by their numbers.  These are they who make the look of the artificial world.  They are man generalized; as units they inevitably lack something of interest; all the more they have cumulative effect.  It would be well if we could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in the clothing of his average body.  Unfortunately he will be slow to be changed.  And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their national customs—­and the wretchedest of them all the wearing of other men’s old raiment—­that they must wait for reform until the reformed dress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have turned second-hand.

VICTORIAN CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and earlier.  Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim the vulgarizing of the married woman.  No one now would read Douglas Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist’s serial, “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” which were presumably considered good comic reading in the “Punch” of that time, and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque.  Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put oneself at a disadvantage.  He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought it worth his eyesight.  The last-named has to bear the least tolerable of modern reproaches—­that he lacks humour; but he need not always care.  Now to turn over Douglas Jerrold’s monologues is to find that people in the mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the arriere boutique.  On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.  Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted.  But the essential vulgarity is that of the woman.  There is in some old “Punch” volume a drawing by Leech—­whom one is weary of hearing