Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/113

110 headdress. I saw the Duchess of Cambridge the other evening at the opera with a crimson-velvet turban! Remember, it is July!

We have seen in the gardens plenty of delicate muslins over gay-coloured silks; this is graceful, but to us it seems inappropriate for as out-of-door-dress.

The absence of taste in the middling classes produces results that are almost ludicrous. I am inclined to think taste is an original faculty, and only capable of a certain direction. This might explain the art of dress as it exists among the English, with the close neighbourhood of Paris, and French milliners actually living among them; and this might solve the mystery of the exquisite taste in gardening in England, and the total absence of it in France.

As you descend in the scale to those who can have only reference to the necessities of life in their dress, the English are far superior to us. Here come in their ideas of neatness, comfort, and durability. The labouring classes are much more suitably dressed than ours. They may have less finery for holy-days, and their servants may not be so smartly dressed in the evening as are our domestics, but they are never shabby or uncleanly. Their clothes are of stouter stuffs, their shoes stronger, and their dress better preserved. We have not, you know,