For the spirit of those days, whether in politics, art, or domestic life, was harsh, severe, self-castigating in its desire for truth, simplicity, and justice, and it outlived too long its original raison d'etre. The injury to trade, the injury to art, the injury to character even, which began with the bloody Revolution, can hardly be over-estimated, and much domestic suffering, especially amongst the young, sprang from the then begotten prejudices and straight-backedness. Things have only recently begun to recover the shock. Not, we must observe, that the spirit of the times was bad in its action on the times; but it was destructive of future advancement and new culture, like a moral stun.

But to our Empire Dress. Napoleon's reign may be said to have begun in 1800, and ended with his abdication in 1815, though his influence lasted much longer.

The Imitation Greek dress in its stage nearest to the Greek, its first stage and its best, was a little past for the general public then. David's habitues were still excessively Greek, wearing the ancient garb, as we might put on a fancy dress at the house of a friend who would take it as a compliment - indeed, some of his pupils carried the silly affectation to such an extreme that David repudiated them as des fous, and les eloigna de son ecole. They were bringing the well-meant movement into disrepute. These Grecomaniacs called themselves the Penseurs. They adopted a Phrygian garb, met together upon fixed days, and at their reunions maintained absolute silence for a given time; then one spoke; he was followed by another, and so on; and whilst they were thus resuscitating the age of Pericles, according to their disordered fancy, they despised David as having 'looked back from the plough,' though they still admitted that he was a man of parts. How often do the disciples of new views outrun the master's meaning until he can have nothing in common with them !

The Merveilleuses sought to be conspicuous by devising bizarre raiment, sometimes by wearing Indian muslin chitonia over pink tights. But the general public - those who did not wish to be conspicuous, those who were not able to support such a primitive garb, either through weak health, shyness, artistic ignorance, or want of beauty - the general public who can only catch fragments of new fashions, and adapt them to the real needs of busy life - what had the array of this large class arrived at? They could not be troubled to arrange Greek folds. The short gown and shorter waist were general now, the one considerably above the ankle, the other a formal made bodice,' gauged and fitte ! The materials - muslin, cotton, or the thinnest silk and wool - were general also. The helmet-shaped bonnet had settled down into a popular form. Of course it had grown larger, and its worst features, by the natural law of fashion, vitiation of the eye, were all magnified. The shoes had shrunk into the most inadequate protection for the foot.

The sleeves, unendurable quite short, now reached the wrists in a slight gigot form (this, later on, was more and more exaggerated; it commenced only with the slight rounding necessary to fit the shoulder joint). Petticoats, indispensable in winter, set the gown out in a wonderfully un-Greek manner; and the milliner, tired of plain skirts, which did not 'pay her,' and were truly very mean-looking and insignificant, had begun to decorate the extinguisher with horrible loops and festoons and lumps, after her time-honoured habit. People must have looked very like bottles with arms and feet then, and the topknot carried out the idea of the cork rather well: not that the topknot was not Greek, for it was Greek; but, with that burlesque of a gown, it gave just that touch of distasteful gingerliness, semi-knowing, but usually indicative of vacancy, which a cork half out always gives a bottle. From 1800 to 1840 variations of this costume were worn by all classes. This was the decadence of the Imitation Greek fashions; this was the true Dress of the Empire.

No doubt, when people praise the Empire dress, they often mean the original copy of the Greek dress, not the ordinary dress of the time of Napoleon I., which was the copied copy of some copy of the first copy, and the last effect was of course as wide of the mark as the final whisper in the old game of' Scandal.'

But there are people, strange to say, who really like the grotesque vagaries of the popular milliner of the Empire - they ignore, as she did, the Greek element - they like the vast coalscuttle bonnet with its steeple feathers, they like the bottle-shaped gown, they like the flat, unmerciful, useless shoes with vile bits of Persian ribbon on them mis-called 'sandals' - they like the mean materials, they like the huge collar up to their ears and the vast festoons on the skirts - they like the harsh and ill-assorted colours - and what the Merveil-lenses perpetrated in the way of combinations of colour only caricatures give one any just notion of!

And now I will show why these people like all this, and why I - who consider that costume the worst and the most trying that ever came in vogue, not excepting the Elizabethan or the costume of Rufus's time, both grotesque, but having the merit of rich materials and careful decoration - can understand their liking it.

There is a quaintness about this dress which seems to suit some persons - chiefly young girls with unformed figures, but some grown women too. I have elsewhere remarked that lines in themselves have a language of their own, apart from the wearer.1 And this bottle-shaped costume bears me out. There is a precision, a brevity, a kind of abruptness in the lines of skirts, plaits, gaugings, etc., which has the same kind of charm at times to the eye as an abrupt or saucy answer in the mouth of a pretty woman sometimes has to the car. II y a du caractire, a Frenchman would say; and the unexpected relief from the sweet monotony of complaisance and natural yieldingness (whether the yieldingness be of a fabric to the figure, or of a mind to another mind) is pleasant, as a change, the more because it is not really beautiful. As we tire of all good and pleasant things, we love change, even to things worse, for a little while; but it is only that we may be able to turn back and enjoy the good things with renewed zest.