Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-13.pdf/773

772 comprising an underskirt with two or three ruffles, and an overskirt and jacket plainly finished off round the edge, for from eight to ten dollars. Her bonnets will cost from five to seven dollars each. Boots are expensive, and not nearly so good or so handsome as they are in the United States. The smaller fineries, such as collars, ribbons, cravats, fans, etc., are proportionately reasonable; so that a woman who has three or four hundred dollars per annum to spend on her dress could really do a good deal with it in Paris, even allowing that she could do none of her own sewing. As for a lady who could make up her own dresses and bonnets, what marvels could she not achieve in a land where good silk can be bought as low as a dollar a yard, and two dollars and a half a yard represents a very handsome article, while worsted goods and mixed fabrics may be procured at from nineteen cents upward!

Parisian ladies do not set as much store by costliness of dress as do Americans, their chief aim being elegance of style, novelty, and, above all, perfect and irreproachable freshness; while our countrywomen seek more for richness of material. The reason for this is obvious: a new dress in Paris not only costs much less than it does with us, but is far easier to obtain. An order to one's dressmaker is all that is necessary for procuring a new toilette here, while at home the process is a troublesome one, involving selection of the material, the style in which it is to be made up, and, last and most troublesome search of all, a skilled dress-maker. It is the same with bonnets. A New York lady must perforce select her bonnets at the very beginning of the season, or else be content with articles of American manufacture, while a Parisienne can step round the corner and select twenty chapeaux in a morning, paying twelve and fifteen dollars for the articles for which her American sister must give forty or fifty. Durability and richness of material, therefore, are distinguishing peculiarities of the latter's toilettes, while freshness and variety characterize the dress of the former.

The prevailing modes of the day show some tendency to a return toward that simplicity of style which has so long been absent from the fashion of our garments. Not that flounces, puffs, ribbons and fringes are banished, or even about to take their departure; but to-day, for the first time in many years, it is possible to wear a perfectly plain dress without looking odd or old-fashioned. Even Worth's show-rooms display dresses whose attractiveness consists in the quality of the silk of which they are composed, and not in the amount of frills and fussing with which they are loaded—rich, heavy brocades, with long plaited trains, the sleeves and train being formed of plain silk matching the color of the brocade, and not a particle of other trimming anywhere, as the edge of the corsage is simply finished with a cording of the silk. Such a dress would have been regarded as a dismal piece of antiquity five years ago. It may be that republican simplicity is creeping into the fashions of Paris, as well as into its institutions, but French fashions change nearly as rapidly as do French governments.

following letter, which we are permitted to publish, though not written with this design, contains some particulars that may not be uninteresting to many readers of Mr. Forster's Life of Dickens:

My dear : I hasten to comply with your request that I should give you some information respecting the family of poor Charles Dickens. I became acquainted with his father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens, in 1850, and Mr. Charles Dickens having requested my husband's medical attendance upon old Mr. Dickens, who was rapidly failing in health, both the father and mother came to live with us in 34 Keppel street, London. Mr. Dickens died under our roof March 31, 1851. He was a kind-hearted man, but fearfully irascible. His fits of temper lasted, however, but a very short time, but whilst they did they were terrible. I remember on one occasion some private theatricals were given at the St.