utterly useless, men in armour — how Sir
Launcelot, singing tira lira by the river, would
have laughed at them!—great gaudy chains
worn over great gaudy gowns, aldermen in
furred robes, and learned clerks in square caps,
bits of silk stitched round a pole and called
banners, sober citizens dressed up like children's
dolls in snippets and fragments of silk and
tinsel, the whole honest ordinary life of work
and home turned inside out, and made like
nothing in heaven and earth—that is a lord
mayor's show, high-court of the rag and
rubbish fetish. But the culmination of this class
of fetishism is at court drawing-rooms and levees,
when we are proud to parade ourselves as utter
and entire savages, whose humanity is oppressed
by the fetish of tailordom, and who are no longer
men and women with souls to be saved, but
merely animated dummies for barbers and
jewellers and tailors and milliners to do what
they like with. Why is it, because I go to pay
my respects (a fetishism in itself) to the queen
or the charming young princess—neither of
whom knows me from Adam, or cares to see me
again, or would give a second thought to my
fate if I set off on the long mileless journey
tomorrow—why should I be compelled to put on
knee-breeches for the display of my miserable
legs? Why must I wear a ridiculous coat like
a beadle's? Why must I damage my own
shins and my neighbour's, with a sword that
will stick out the wrong way, and that, do
what I will, I cannot any more manage with
case and dexterity, than Noodle and Doodle
manage theirs in the tragedy of Tom Thumb?
Why must my wife spend a sum of pounds
upon a long length of silk which she puts
on over her gown proper, behind, and which
the great art is to let trail on the ground
like a peacock's tail, only it is not half so
beautiful? Why should she be obliged to put
three white feathers down one side of her head
and face, and two long lengths of lace into her
"back hair"? Why should she uncover those
dear old shoulders of hers to the pitiless light of
day and the more pitiless eyes of the court?
Why must she run the risk of catching cold
by changing her comfortable ribbed merino
stockings and rational house boots, for the
thinnest silk and satin to be procured for love
or money?

Why should all this be? And why should a
court dress be regarded as a passport to certain
moral and social consideration, if we were not all
given over to fetishism, bound hand and foot
under the shadow of rags? Ah! what an essay
might be written on rags—from the velvet rags
of the worn-out throne, to the prison rags of the
dead convict! Yes, the whole of a court-day
costume is fetishism, as indeed is all fashion
whatever. And a most potent fetish too; which
it is as much as a man's very life is worth to
insult.

Fancy a lank lean uncrinolined petticoatless
lady at a Queen's Ball, in the year of Grace one
thousand eight hundred and sixty-four! Would
not all the little yelping worshippers of the
millinery fetish set upon her like so many
excited beagles, and bark her into a corner and social
extinction altogether? Fancy, too, a "morning
dress" of brown merino at a grande soirée, or a
low muslin in the morning, though it be the dog-
days. And yet what inherent virtue is there in
one cut of the cloth more than in another? And
why should that be disallowed at twelve A.M.
which is de rigueur at seven P.M.? Imagine
Aspasia in Ionic chiton and graceful saffron-
coloured peplum falling to her heels, walking
down Pall Mall with head uncovered and rosy
feet—a trifle spread, we should say—shod in
sandals! What would all the clubs say to this
rebel against the reigning fetish? There are men
in those clubs who would face a Balaclava charge
without wincing, but I doubt if one among them
would give Aspasia his arm. Still less would he
give it to the noblest woman now living on this
earth, if she had made herself up in tunic and
"pantalets," and walked abroad as a full-fledged
Bloomer, disdainful of lengths of silk. Yet
Fatima and Zuleika may wear a like costume, and
be taken as models for pictures and poems and
ballets and Christmas pieces for the same; but
poor Jane Smith!—Zuleika's fetish and Jane's
have different names, you see, and are not
interchangeable.

Again, is not our military costume a fetish,
whatever else may be of free birth? The high
tight stock, and the burning scarlet cloth, and
the tight-buttoned, thickly-padded, pocketless
coat, and the tight-buttoned, almost-pocketless
trousers, and all the darling pipeclay and barrack
finery, absurd enough at home but in hot
countries simply destructive—what is it but a
fetish? a fetish made of rags and routine, but
suffered to sit on men's necks till it chokes
them, and they fall down dead beneath its
weight! A fetish, too, is complimentary mourning;
or, indeed, mourning of any kind when the
survivors are poor and bread is hard to get for
the children. The poor dead ghost would rest
none the less safely in its narrow bed, if the
scanty means left behind went for boots and
beef, and, perhaps, a month's extra schooling,
instead of black cloth and deep swathes of
crape, and stuffy crape veils, and dusty feathers
tied up in bunches and put on the top of a
black chest set on wheels, and big blocks of
stone, and all the savage paraphernalia of a
Christian burial. Of course no law compels you
to worship this fetish; but then, remember, if
you rebel in these things you fall under the
shadow of another fetish—a terribly potent Old
Man of the Sea, whose name is Respectability,
and whose kingdom is unlimited and his power
without check.

Is it not a fetish, the habit of paying morning
calls, which however are always afternoon
calls; when every one expects to find every
one else abroad, and when no one dares, for
the life of him, call either in the morning or
in the evening, when there would be a better
chance of finding friends in their own
drawing-rooms? And if this denial is a fetish,
what is the habit of "leaving cards," without