But it is not among the grand monde—­if the term be not ridiculous as applied to Victoria—­that you must go to discover taste.  I am not sure that, class for class, the rich do not show the least taste in their apparel.  Many of them send to Paris for their dresses, and pay sums, which make one’s mouth water, to be dressed in the latest fashion; but I fancy that the French modistes manufacture a certain style of attire for the Australian taste, just as the French merchants manufacture clarets for the Australian market.  It is a compound of the cocotte and the American.  Nor when she has got a handsome dress does the Melbourne grande dame know how to wear it; she merely succeeds in looking what a Brighton lodging-house keeper once defined to me as a ‘carriage-lady.’  A lady of the English upper middle-class dressed by a London milliner looks infinitely better.

There are some costumes worn by Victorian ladies which you will never see worn by any other ladies; but for all that, the middle and even the lower class am by no means destitute of ideas about dress.  Compare the Melbourne with the Birmingham or Manchester factory girl, or the young lady in a Collins Street retail establishment with the shop-girl in any but the most aristocratic part of London; the old country will come out second-best.  And why is it?  It is no easy question to answer; at the bottom is undoubtedly that general love of display, which is almost as characteristic of Melbourne as it is of Paris.  But then what is the cause of that?  And a love of display, though it may be and is amongst the wealthy productive of grand dresses, as it is of grand dinners and grand furniture, does not make taste—­e.g., the Second Empire; and though it would be going too far to say that the ladies of Melbourne dress tastefully, it is within the truth to give them credit for a tendency towards taste.  Throughout England the middle and lower classes dress hideously.  Why should the first generation of Victorians show a disposition to abandon the ugly?  I leave it to some aesthetic philosopher to find out the reason, and content myself with noting the fact.  If I wanted to moralize, I have little doubt that the drapers’ and milliners’ accounts of these ‘young ladies’ would furnish a redundant text, and that, although a large number of them make up their dresses themselves from paper patterns or illustrations in Myra’s Journal.  How they can afford to dress as well as they do, they and their mothers best know; but the bow here and the flower there are not costly things, and the mere fact of being able to cut out a dress so as not to look dowdy shows natural taste.  It is the rarest of sights to see a real Melbourne girl look dowdy.  Her taste sometimes runs riot:  it is exuberant, and becomes vulgar and flash; but even then the vulgarity and flashness are of a superior type to those of her equals across the ocean.