From The Spectator. THE DEAN OF CHESTER ON FASHION.

is compensation for his shortened days. He died, having got all the distinctions of which, in his sphere, he was capable-in THE Dean of Chester seems to have possession of a fame which extended through Europe, and the support and given a very thoughtful sermon on fashsympathy of many friends. Henri Quatre ion to his audience at St. James's, Piccahad courted him; James of England and dilly, if we may judge of it by the interScotland, with still greater warmth, sought esting report in Monday's Daily News. his society; Marie de Medici held him He was not as hot against fashion as fast as in a leash, not willing quite to preachers usually think themselves bound forego such an honour to the nation. to be, though, perhaps, his moral critiThis was what the poor hunted pasteur's cism gained in realism by this sobriety of son of Dauphiné came to by learning and tone. He thought fashion had its uses; by Greek. We cannot allow that he had that its changes break up the monotony very much reason to complain. He was of life and prevent the stagnation of never rich, to be sure, never, to speak | habit; that its variations fix the attenmore correctly, anything but poor; but tion of men on points not unfrequently if the substantial pudding was now and of real interest which would be apt otherthen defective, the praise never failed, wise to escape adequate observation, just and that is a wonderful compensation. as fashion gave a stimulus to physical His life was full of toiling and moiling, science in the days of Charles II., and but for the objects most dear to him, his has often given a stimulus to true philanown cherished and darling aims; and it thropic reforms, moral, social, and politwas so far a successful life. We cannot, ical, in our own; and again, that the fixed with Dr. Pattison, give the world assur- conventions of society take a good deal ance of a man by whom it will be deeply of trouble and consideration off the minds impressed, or of an example profoundly and hands of people who would otherwise instructive; but yet the stooping figure, find it very anxious and onerous work to the dim, gentle countenance, the thirst choose among all the small alternatives for reading, which makes even friends which, as it is, fashion decides promptly for irksome, and all distracting lesser busi- them. But the evils of fashion, accordness a burden to him, makes an agreeing to the preacher, corresponded very able picture, and comes to us full of a nearly to these advantages. If made certain touching personality. We knew much of, it is apt to break up men's nothing of this being yesterday-to-day thought into ripples quite too minute for he is clear to us with all his fretfulnesses coherence and steadiness in pursuits and feeblenesses his candid dissatis- which aim at higher than temporary and faction, yet loyal faith-his blameless life, his dusty researches, his eagerness to read everything at once, his peevish pathetic outcries for the wife whose absence turns all the world upside down. The scholar fits kindly, if not magnificently, into his place in the long and va-absorb time and effort, it wastes power rious story of mankind the story most worth study of any in existence; and we thank Dr. Pattison for the revelation.

capricious ends; again, it diverts attention from important subjects which really need it, to subjects which do not; and as fashion is more and more magnified, instead of economizing power by settling indifferent matters which would otherwise

by erecting purely conventional trifles into matters of great moment. In short, if we interpret Dean Howson's drift Just one word more, however—and the aright, the use of fashion is to guide our censure is a paltry one-why should all judgment in trifles in which it is usually our canons be disturbed by some mis- better to go with the crowd, than to try chievous printer's devil who has been to have a mind of our own; while its permitted to spell greek with a small g, abuse consists in making it a matter of and to write french and english in this first-rate importance that we should imihumiliating way? The rector of Lincoln tate the crowd, whereas the only advanCollege can never himself have been tage of imitating the crowd is the econoguilty of such an affectation; it is worse my of moral and intellectual effort on than calling good Madame Casaubon, ex-insignificant points thereby secured to cellent, homely housewife, and mother of us. As regards the sequences and twenty-two children, jauntily, as if she changes of fashion, Dean Howson even had been still eighteen, by her pretty ventured to suggest that they might be Christian name.

regarded as in some sense the expres sions of a sort of law of social phenome

the outward shows of the physical universe: and he classed them all together because he regarded all as mere temporary manifestations of something that would endure, but that would endure in a very different shape from that in which it then existed. Hence we think the passage on which the Dean of Chester was commenting would have been taken in a somewhat more real and less strained sense, if he had insisted on one of the

na, which, like some laws of physical phenomena, the signs of human affecphenomena, may turn out to be of more tion, the grief and laughter of the heart, importance than the phenomena them- no less than the commercial habits and selves. Why fashion passes from light the domestic institutions of society and to serious or from serious to light, why it becomes now simple and now highly artificial, why it patronizes the uttermost idealism in art to-day and the stiffest realism to-morrow, why it is openly frivolous in one generation and ostentatiously earnest in the next, this may really be a matter of more significance and better worth studying, than any particular fashion which may be in question. Even though you attach no great importance to following the fashion, the ques-greatest of all uses of fashion, the tention why the fashion is what it is, may be a really important one, and the Dean of Chester may very probably be right in holding that changes in fashion are subject to something like an intelligible law of their own, instead of being the result of a confusion of various laws whose heart. No doubt St. Paul was not referjoint action is practically incalculable ring more to that changefulness which from the number of interferences with expresses restlessness, than to that each other involved. Imitation is no changefulness which comes of a direct doubt, as Dr. Howson says, the principle law of change like the changes in exterof fashion; but in selecting what they nal nature. It was the temporary charshall imitate, how they shall set the ball acter of all that is seen, that he was dirolling, the leaders of fashion are no lating on, not specially the fickleness of doubt influenced, consciously or uncon-human life. But no doubt, too, the sciously, by some weariness of mood, or some unsatisfied craving, which really determines the new direction of the tide. And the secret of that weariness or craving may be worth knowing.

But the Dean of Chester, with all his thoughtfulness, does not appear to have struck on the greatest of all the moral uses of fashion, though his text - "The fashion of this world passeth away" would have been less of a pun, if he had hit upon it. Of course, as the Dean warned his audience, the "fashion of this world" in St. Paul's sense, only inIcluded what we call fashion, as an abstract idea includes all that can by any means be brought under it. Of course, what St. Paul was speaking of was "the form (τò oкñμa) of this world, its external sequences and temporary order as a whole; and only so far as human fashion is a part of this great pageantry, which in all probability it was not consciously to St. Paul's thought at the moment, could it be supposed that he was referring to it when he said, “The fashion of this world passeth away." But what he certainly was referring to was the whole temporary order and visible spectacle of the society in which he lived, including the highest as well as the lowest visible

dency of its essential changefulness, if not caprice, to create a hunger for the realities which do not change,-realities which can alone make the spectacle of the constant flux of tastes and habits in human society tolerable to the human

dean's subject, "fashion," does bring home to us the transitoriness of the outsides of things more closely than any other variable element in the external universe, for whether it is really so or not, fashion appears to be variable by preference and design; inconstancy is as it were, the excellence of fashion; indeed the only thing it would like to perpetuate is innovation. Incessant transformation is, according to science, the law of the universe, heat being only another form of motion, and nervous action, it is believed, only another form of heat; but in these cases the mind assumes, at all events, a sameness beneath the difference, and under the name of the "correlation of forces" asserts that every such change of force is more apparent than real, and that something called "force" persists through every change. But "fashion," in the technical sense, is change from which all trace of permanence is purposely, as far as possible, excluded. It is the symbol of a perpetual weariness and incessant unrest. And for that very reason, it drives the mind more than any other kind of change into the longing for "a repose that ever is the same." More than any other element in the whirl of life, the whirl of fashion

in us.

makes the head grow giddy and the | but then the life which seeks to make the heart dry; nor is this wonderful, for it is form (or fashion) express and embody not mere external change, but the change- something permanent and eternal, is a fulness of desire which fags us, and much higher life than either. To feed scorches up the reserve of living power a mind on change is impossible, but to feed it on what is permanent in change, Dean Howson would probably say that is not only possible, but the most truly it would be a little odd to enumerate as natural of all human procedures. The one of the uses of fashion, that it repels use of the whirl of external change is to men till they come within the attraction rouse and then to repel,- to awaken the of the opposite pole of that great magnet hunger and thirst of men by giving them of the universe which is constituted in some conception of the scale and the veequal proportions of permanence and locity of the social universe, and then to change. If that be correct, why should sicken them of a process which does not we not say with equal accuracy that it is satisfy, though it excites the deepest of one of the great uses of the contempla- their cravings. It is impossible to doubt tive or the habitual life to throw one back that the original preachers of an eternal on the whirl of fashion? We should re-life had felt a considerable fascination ply, that as regards mere conventional, for the transitory elements of transitory or even mere monotonous habit, that excitement in their own youth. St. John might be said with equal truth. It is the surely could hardly have denounced "the result, and a good result, of a groove of lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye mere dull habit, that it excites the crav- and the pride of life," as being "not of ing for change simply as change, change the Father, but of the worid," without which wakes up the life within the inan- having keenly felt them; and St. Paul's imate chrysalis. Nor does the scorn own knowledge of the world, which was which religion tries to inspire for the evidently wide, could not have been "fashion of this world, which passeth gained without a great insight into the seaway," ever lead anybody back again to cret of its attractions. "The world passthe life of mere habit; on the contrary, eth away, and the lusts thereof, but he the thirst for something more real than that doeth the will of God abideth forperpetual change, once experienced, can ever," is the saying of one who knew never be slaked by a return to the life of profoundly the fascinations of the ripple routine. It is the use as well as the caused by the poorer excitements of life, abuse of the quick, rapid, frivolous life, and knew that the craving for them that it renders the dull, unmeaning life could only be quenched by a deeper and of "unconscious cerebration," as physiol- more permanent spring of pure feeling. ogists call mere habit, intolerable, and Fashion, high or low, the eager current obliges all who are not lost in the fasci- of social excitements, is one of the best nation of a whirl of shallow interests, of all the witnesses to the vanity of none of which last beyond the day, to change, and the yearning for a life in seek springs of deeper interest, all of what is permanent. If the changes which which are permanent. The life of mere fashion introduces teach something, the change, however rapid and fickle, is more protest it awakens against living in of a human life than the life of mere rou- what is liable to pass away, teaches much tine, which is hardly conscious life at all, more. but only a physical preparation for life;

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THE GRAVE'S VOICES. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, BY ANTONIA DICKSON.

And the ears, as they rustled faintly,
Appeared in accents saintly
This burden to repeat-
"More useful are we than honey-bee
Though she labour long and merrily."

SUNK as in dreams, and lost in anxious thought
My footsteps brought me to this lonely spot.
To whom belongs the field? this flowery bed?"Yes," each said, his confident head

"The dead."

See here, O man! where all thy paths must end,

However varied be the way they wend.

Leaning towards his neighbour;
"We alone are the givers of bread,
The rewarders of all men's labour;
To baron and boor,

To cottar and king,
To the rich and the poor

Our blessing we bring,

More useful by far than this sonorous thing."

The bee swung high

The tall hedge over,
And hummed her reply

As she skimmed the clover:

Listen! the dead leaves speak; ay, hear thou "My harvest may be small,

Yet it is far sweeter,
Yielding more delight
To high or lowly eater.
You give food to man,

But it lacketh savour;
Scant the gift I bring,

But of delicious flavour."

"Thanks to thee for answer thine,
O most sapient hummer!
To each prosy comer
Twill be answer mine,"
Said the singer ;
When men dine.

What croak the ravens on yon moss-grown" wall?

I would pour the wine-
I would be the honey-bringer."
Examiner.

H. B. BAILDON.