NAPOLEON'S FAREWELL. FAREWELL to my visions of conquest and glory, Was destined to prove so prophetic of mine; I thought to steer clear of the rock where he stranded, My destiny drove me to ruin red-handed, So soon I had vowed my devotion to Peace. Farewell to thee, Paris, the pride of my power, Bright Empress of Europe! fair Queen of the Seine! I thought to have made thee the world's fairest flowerIt may be I never shall see thee again. I leave thee my blessing, imperial city; Of marble I leave thee, who found thee not stone;Thy gratitude is not for me, nor thy pity I pray that thou mayst not be hurled from thy throne. Farewell to thee, France! 'twas my Pride to advance thee The phantom that fiends have invented to purge I bid ye farewell, ye imperial Eagles Alas! it's the turn of the Vultures to reign; So now I must follow it over the Rhine! THOMAS HERBERT NOYES, JUN. HOUSE ANGEL IN TRIM ARRAY. BY PERCEVAL PICARD. THE Angel in the House, under the present dispensation, has to dispense with wings. Indeed, it may be doubted whether those exalted and exalting appendages might not be, upon the whole, a disturbing influence in the homely details of the economy of the household. For indoors life they would be a superfluous gracea grace of supererogation. But, failing these outward and visible signs of an inward and not invisible grace, it is meet and right in the Angel in the House, and, by a consentaneous catena of authorities, her bounden duty, to be studious and scrupulous in the matter of neat apparel, and to be seen always and only in trim array. Not, a thousand times not, that she should be overdressed. An overdressed Angel is a contradiction in terms. We associate not angelic attributes with the gorgeous attire and plenipotent jewellery of a Houndsditch Hebrewess. Just as the man who is got up in the loudest of loud costume, and hangs out as a sort of Christmas tree, with incongruous braveries and charms and nicknacks pendent all over, we are apt to deem not a gentleman, but a gent. Holy George Herbert is for A fine aspect in fit array, Neither too mean, nor yet too gay. Potent, grave, and reverend seniors are not awanting, who applaud both what was said to the French actress, that the premier principe of her art was attention to costume, and what that lively dame said in reply, that le premier principe d'une femme c'est de paraître jolie. Boon Nature to the woman bows; She walks in all its glory clad, No splendour 'neath the sky's proud dome The worm its golden woof presents; It is a grave and influential Doctor of Divinity, of the Scottish Kirk too, who scouts as pure nonsense Thomson's averment that beauty when unadorned is adorned the most-which is much as to say that a pretty young woman, in the matter of physical appearance, is a person of whom no more can be made. Now taste and skill, it is contended, can make more of almost anything. "And you will set down Thomson's lines as flatly opposed to fact, when your lively young cousin walks into your room to let you see her before she goes out to an evening party; and when you compare that radiant vision, in her robes of misty texture, and with hair arranged in folds the most complicated-wreathed, and satin-slippered-with the homely figure that took a walk with you that afternoon, russet-gowned, tartan-plaided, and shod with serviceable shoes for tramping through country mud." The lovely young Lavinia once had friends, of one mind with Thomson that a simple robe was her best attire, Beyond the pomp of dress; for loveliness But is when unadorned adorned the most. Otherwise minded are most of his and her critics now. Only now and then is to be met with a sentiment like Giovanna's, in Landor's Fra Rupert, in answer to Agnes of Durazzo's girlish plea, "We, at our time of life, want these adornments." Giov. We never want them. Youth has all its own. Colonel Whyte Melville, like Dr. Boyd, makes a dead-set against the Lavinian dogma, and avows a defiant preference of the French maid's coiffure to dishevelled tresses; and of the trim silk stocking and neat satin shoe, to the slippers down at heel; and of the shapely corsage and its concomitants, to limp and unassuming undress. Who, demands A. K. H. B., would marry a slatternly girl, whose dress is frayed at the edges, and whose fingers are through her gloves? It is all very well, exclaims Mr. Trollope, for the world to say that a girl should be happy without reference to her clothes. Show him such a girl, and he will show you one whom he should be very sorry that a boy of his should choose as his sweetheart. He pleads, therefore, with fathers for a liberal wardrobe for their girls, if they go out into society. "Girls with slender provisions of millinery may be fit to go out,-quite fit in their fathers' eyes; and yet all such going out may be matter of intense pain." We have Homer's warrant for paternal exultation in a daughter's trim array: A just applause the cares of dress impart, A modern Jewish adage runs thus: "Let a man clothe himself 66 beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife above his ability." To the first clause, Mr. Trollope would take exception, to judge from a passage in another of his books, where he counsels souls masculine as well as feminine to dress well; adding, "In my mind, men, like churches and books, and and women too, should be brave, not mean, in their outward garniture." Dr. Oliver W. Holmes pronounces dowdyism to be clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. And he defies us to produce a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before her lord." And elsewhere this most genial of medical literati expresses a fervid appreciation of the general effect, in a well-dressed woman, of clear, well-matched colours, of harmonious proportions, of the cut which makes everything cling like a bather's sleeve where a natural outline is to be kept, and ruffle itself up like the hackle of a pitted fighting-cock where art has a right to luxuriate in silken exuberance. The laureate has taught us how brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court, loved his wife Enid as he loved the light of Heaven And as the light of Heaven varies, now At sunrise, now at sunset, now by night In crimsons and in purples and in gems. And Enid, but to please her husband's eye, Of broken fortunes, daily fronted him And in an after passage the caution is given, Let never maiden think, however fair, She is not fairer in new clothes than old. To Lady Eastlake we owe the same caution couched in prose. Let no woman, she warns all women, suppose that any man can be really indifferent to her appearance: the instinct may have been deadened in his mind by a slatternly negligent mother, or by plain, maiden, low-church sisters; but she may be sure it is there, and, with a little adroitness, capable of revival. "As regards an affectation not unfrequent in the sex-that of apathy towards the affairs of the toilet, we can only assure them, for their own sakes, that there is not a worse kind of affectation going. We should doubt, in the first place, whether the woman who is indifferent to her own appearances be a woman at all." One of these unwomanly anomalies is embodied by Mr. Trollope in the person of Mrs. Prim (Dorothea Ray), who, in selecting her widow's weeds, seemed to have resolved to repress all ideas of feminine softness-as though she had sworn to herself, with a great oath, that man should never look on her again with gratified eyes. Not yet twenty years old, the young widow was "rough with weeds." Her caps were lumpy, heavy, full of woe, and clean only as decency might require-not nicely clean with feminine care. Her dress was "rough, and black, and clinging-disagreeable to the eye in its shape, as will always be the dress of any woman which is worn day after day at all hours." She was, in effect, a proselyte of that eminent divine who asked why should we pet and pamper these bodies of ours, which are soon to be reduced to a state of mucilaginous fusion? About which question there is what has been called a plausibility that for half a minute, perhaps, tends to make you think it may be proper to leave off taking your daily bath, and brushing your nails and teeth-and that instead of employing tailor or milliner for the future, it might be well to assume a horse-rug. "But of course anything that revolts common sense, can never be a part of Christian doctrine or duty." And the natural reply to the rhetorical question aforesaid is offered to this effect: that after these mortal frames are so fused, we shall wholly cease to care for them; but that meanwhile we should suitably tend and clothe them, because it is comfortable to do so, and God's manifest intention that we should do so. Joanna, in The Gayworthys, is a pretty antithesis in petticoats to the widow Prime. She could not help her habit of niceness, her author says; could not turn away from that image in the little mirror until every wavy line lay smooth upon the bright head, and rolled itself away gracefully into the braids behind; any more than an artist could turn from his work, leaving a heedless or mistaken touch. "It was habit-instinct; sense of the pure and perfect; these more than vanity. She could not have done violence to her nature-she could not deliberately make herself dowdy-even though Gershom should have really liked her better so." Which, knowing something of men and their contradictions, we may, with the author, feel tolerably safe in doubting after all. Robert Burns, his biographers tell us, was always anxious that his wife should have a "neat and genteel appearance." She sometimes pleaded that the duties of nursing and kitchen economics ought to excuse her being not quite point device. Burns was ruffled by the excuse-so far at least as to remonstrate against it, and he showed himself in earnest by buying for bonnie Jean the best clothes he could afford. Any little novelty in female attire was sure, Mr. Robert Chambers affirms, "to meet with patronage from Burns-all with the aim of keeping up a spirit for neat dressing in his wife." We are assured, for instance, of the exciseman's wife being one of the first persons in Dumfries who ap |