Lace. The rich products of Mechlin,
Valenciennes, Brussels, and Liege; the scarcely
less valuable wares of Nottingham and
Honiton; the almost priceless remnants of " old
point"—"beggars' lace"—the lace that
Henrietta Maria loved to wear and Vandyck
to paint. Not one, therefore, of Mrs.
Brummus's tattered morsels of lace but has its
history and its moral. Here is the veil in
which poor Clara Rackleton was married
to Captain Middleman. They had a grand
estate (grandly encumbered) at Ballyragget,
in the County Galway. Charley Middleman
kept hounds and open house; and his
widow lives now in a boarding-house at
Tours with her two daughters. Clara's Brussels
lace veil was not sold by her lady's maid
nor by the bride herself. It was neither lost
nor stolen; but Captain Middleman, formerly
of the twenty-fifth Hussars, privately conveyed
Mrs. Middleman's veil, together with two
ostrich feathers and a carved ivory Chinese
fan, to Mrs. Brummus's emporium. He drove
the bargain, he pocketed the money, and he
lost that same money half-an-hour afterwards
at chicken-hazard, at the Little Nick near
Leicester Square.

A wedding dress—all white satin, lace, and
silver sprigs. Methinks I can see it now,
glistening and sparkling in the August sun,
and rustling and crumpling in the August
air, as, at the close of the London season,
its beautiful wearer descends that ugly
narrow little staircase, which has been a
ladder of delight to so many, a via dolorosa
to so many more, and which leads from
the vestry-room of St. George's, Hanover
Square, into Maddox Street. The wearer of
the satin dress comes down the shabby steps
a wedded bride. She is married to a lord;
a duke has given her away. Fourteen young
bridesmaids in white have wept at the
responses. Two have fainted, and one has been
carried into the vestry, to be sal-volatilised.
A nervous clergyman has addressed the bride-
expectant as " Thomas, wilt thou have this
man to be thy wedded wife?" The bridegroom
has been seized with the usual deadly
perturbation, and offers to place the ring on
the finger of the pew-opener; and the clerk,
while gravely correcting the errors of all
parties, has viewed the whole proceedings
with an air of deep misanthropy. At last,
somehow or other, the right man has married
the right woman; the pew-opener and beadle
have been feed, and the verger remembered;
the clergyman has had his rights and the
clerk his dues. The licence has been conned
over; the register has been signed—by the
bridegroom in a character meant to be very
valiant and decided, but in reality very
timorous and indistinct; by the bride with
no pretence or compromise, but in a simply
imbecile and hysterical manner; by the father
of the bride in a neat hand I should like to
see at the bottom of a cheque; and by big
General Gwallyor of the Indian army (the
additional witness) in a fierce military
manner, with a dash at the end like an oath.
The little boys have shouted, and the
wedding carriage, with its crimson-vested post-
boys and spanking greys, has clattered
up; the policemen have put down an
imaginary riot, threatened with their batons
the crowd generally, and menaced with
arrest one individual lamp-post; and then,
shining out like a star among the silver
favours and orange flowers, the snowy
dresses and black dress coats, the smiles
and tears, comes the bride: God bless
her! Is there a sight more beautiful
under heaven than a young bride coming out
of church? Can you forget Sir John Suckling's
beautiful lines in his ballad upon a
wedding?—

"Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light.
And then she dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight."*

Now, alas, my lord is at Florence, my lady
is in furnished lodgings in London, and the
bride's dress is at Mrs. Brummus's. There
was an action at law in the Court of Queen's
Bench respecting them not long since; and
numberless suits in all sorts of courts are
pending between them now. My lord hates
my lady, and my lady hates my lord; and
they write abusive letters against each other
to their mutual friends.

Fashion is born, is married, and dies every
year, and Fashion is buried in Mrs. Brummus's
dusky shop: she watches its funeral pyre, and
superintends the process of its incineration;
until, phoenix-like, it rises again from its ashes
to die again.

Fashion dies. It is so far like a prince
or a rich man that while it lives we dress it
up in purple and fine linen, and fall down
and worship it, and quarrel with and hate
our brothers and sisters, for a smile from our
demi-god, for a card for Fashion's balls or the
entrée to Fashion's back-stairs. But no sooner
is the demi-god dead than we utterly desert
and forget it. We do not condescend, as in
the case of dead humanity, to fold its rottenness
in gold and crimson velvet, to build a
marble monument above it, sculptured all
over with lies; to state in an inscription that
beneath repose the ashes of such and such a
most noble, high, mighty, powerful Prince
Fashion, who was a father to his subjects, and
a model to his compeers, and was in short the
very best Fashion that ever was known, and
the first fashionable gentleman in the world.
No, we allow the corpse of Fashion to putrefy
in the gutter, or to be eaten up by the
vultures, and the storks, and adjutant birds.
There have been kings treated as cavalierly.
When the luxurious Louis Quinze lay at the

* Founded on a beautiful old superstition of the English
peasantry that the sun dances upon an Easter morning.