But a change takes place; a light, graceful, low-crowned hat, with a brim wide enough for shelter or for shade, begins to appear as a fashion;—­and how is it received?  The clergyman thinks it would be very unclerical for him to wear it, though it may be as black, and is as modest, as the rest of his apparel.  The young doctor timidly tries it on, and in his first walk meets the wealthy hypochondriac, his favorite patient, and the one who is trying to introduce him to practice, who seriously advises him, as a friend, not to wear that new-fangled thing,—­if the poor hat had only been ugly, there would have been nothing bad in its new-fangled quality,—­as all his respectable patients will leave him if he dresses so like a fool.  The young lawyer gets one, because he heard an old lady speak of “those impudent-looking hats,” and he is in hopes that impudence, which he understands is all-important in his profession, and which he is conscious of not possessing, may come with the hat.  A lady goes out with her son, who is just old enough to have gained a coat, and is looking for his first hat.  The mother has taste and judgment, and the youth has yet some unperverted affinity with graceful forms left, and so they choose and buy one of these comfortable and elegant chapeaux.  Just before they reach home, they meet one of their best friends, a person whom the lady regards most kindly, and the young man admires and respects, and he greets him with, “Why, Tom! have you got one of those rowdy hats?” And so the stiff, stove-pipe monstrosity keeps its place, and the only pleasant, sensible, graceful, becoming hat that the nineteenth century has known, is called all sorts of bad names, and quiet gentlemen are afraid to wear it.

Has it not been the fate of the shawl, too, the most simple and elegant wrapper, and comfortable withal, that a man can throw around him, to be scouted and flouted?

Yes, Deformed!  Come on next winter with a white surtout in your hand that must fit so tightly that your victims can but just screw themselves into it, with a stiff, square collar touching the ears, and seven capes, one over the other, “small by degrees and beautifully less,” and all respectable gentlemen will accept it, and virtuously frown down, as dandies or rowdies, those who will not sacrifice their shawls to the ugly idol.

A GROWL.

I know it is generally considered decidedly boorish to utter complaints against the ladies.  But I am for the present a bachelor, and in that capacity claim freedom of speech as my peculiar privilege.  In virtue of my unhappy position, then, I proceed to utter the first of a series of savage growls, wishing the ladies to understand me as fully in earnest in this; that when I growl loud, I must be supposed to mean what I growl.