the Diana of that Ephesus looked suddenly seaward, and a flood tide of fashion rose along Narragansett Bay, and overflowed Newport.

Singular are the deposits it left and is leaving. This amorphous "Ocean;" this Grecian "Atlantic;" this "Bellevue" enlarged out of all recognizable proportions; this whirl of fashionable equipages, these hats and coats, this confused din of dancing music, scandal, flirtation, serenades, and supreme voice of the sea breaking through the fog and dust; this singing, dancing, and dawdling incessantly; this crushing into a month in the country that which crowds six months in town-these are the foot-prints of Fashion upon the sea-shore-these the material with which we build the golden statue to our Diana.

Beyond doubt, Newport is the great watering-place of the country. And as such, as assembling yearly the allied army of fashionable forces from every quarter, it is the most satisfactory point from which to review the host and mark the American aspect of Fashion.

A very little time will reveal its characteristic to be exaggeration. The intensity, which is the natural attribute of a new race, and which finds in active business its due direction, and achieves there its truest present success, becomes ludicrous in the social sphere, because it has no taste and no sense of propriety.

Scciety is as much a sphere of art as any of the more recognized spheres. To be rich, and to visit certain persons, no more fits a man or woman for society, than to be twenty years old and to have a palette fits him to be an artist. When, therefore, a boy embarks in business at ten years of age and retires a man at forty or fifty with a fortune, he is in the situation of one who in the passionate pursuit of the means has put the end out of his attainment. He has been so long making his shoes that by inaction his feet are withered, and he can not walk. the same man, who can never be an addition or an ornament to society, which demands the harmonious play of rare gifts, shall be very eminent and useful in that active life which requires the stern labor of very different powers.

Yet

Thus, as wealth is a primal necessity of society, because giving it a pedestal, and allowing its generous whims and fancies full play, so wherever wealth is not an antecedent, but must be acquired, the force and maturity of talent will always be swallowed up in the pedestal, and the statue will be light and imperfect, or, what is worse, an imbecile imitation. In a society formed under such circumstances, wealth will always enjoy an unnatural and undignified consideration.

Now the test of a man is his manner of using

means, not of acquiring them. Any adroit laborer can quarry marble, but how many men could have wrought the Apollo or the Venus? And how many men who have made fortunes spend money well?

I do not imply that they are not generous, and even lavish; but how much does the expenditure advance the great common interests of men? In this country where fortunes are yearly made and spent, what results of that spending have we to show? We have carriages, and upholstery, and dinners, and elaborate houses, and the waistcoats of Young America blaze with charms, and it returns from "abroad" with a knowledge of Parisian tailoring and haberdashery, which would be invaluable in the first Broadway establishment interested in those matters.

But consider that we get few pictures, statues, buildings, gardens, or parks, for the money we spend; consider that no rich man has yet thought to endow this country with a musuem of casts, like the Meng's Museum in Dresden, by which we should have all the finest sculptures of every age in the most perfectly accurate copy, only differing from the original in the material.

"I have made my money, and I am not going to throw it away," is the response of Croesus to any such suggestion; and he builds a house in the most fashionable street rather larger than his neighbor's.

NEWPORT.

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but a reproduction of it in every upholstering detail.

Fine plate and glass, and Louis Quinze and Louis Quatorze deformities follow, and Croesus, Jr. has a pair of 2 40's, and a wagon of weight proportioned to the calibre of that young gentleman; and, as he dashes up the Newport dust, some cynical pedestrian Timon, whitened and blinded by that dust, can not help inquiring if this is the best statue that could be wrought out of all the marble old Croesus quarried!

The houses, and horses, and carriages are not to be derided; for, as I said already, these are the pedestal; they are the matters of course. But to the eye of the money-making genius, they are valuable for themselves, and not as means, and there is the necessary mistake of a society so constituted. If a man buys a luxurious carpet, not that his friends may tread softly and their sense be soothed, but that it may proclaim his ability to buy the carpet, that it may say with green and red and yellow emphasis— "at least twenty thousand a year"—it is no longer beautiful, and you feel the presence of a man who is mastered by his means, and to whom any other man with a larger rent roll will be respectable and awful.

From all this spring the ludicrous details of our society. We dress too well; we dance too well: we are too gracious and graceful; our entertainments

H

are too elegant; our modesty degenerates into prudery and bad taste; we are "smart," but not witty; flashy, but not gay.-Young America is too young. Its feet are beautifully small, and the head is proportioned to them. Society is only a ball. The heels have carried it against the head; and why not, since the education and daily life of the youth fits him for little else than shaking his heels adroitly.

We dance because we are unable to talk. The novels of foreign society fascinate us by their tales of a new sphere. Where are such women, we say, where such men? We fancy it is the despairing dream of a romance, but it is really the fact of foreign life. We are very chivalric; no nation reaches our point of courtly devotion to woman as woman. But our chivalry is not entirely unfeuda