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Show THE SILK GOWN. It is mentioned as a great extravagance of Heliogabalus that he had a garment entirely of silk. Shade of royalty, what would your critics think of us moderns, who believe ourselves badly off with only one, when not a cook or scullion in America but has or means to have a gown of silk? Silk, which was once sold for its weight in gold, has become an every-day sort of affair with us - not an extravagance, but a necessity; and yet in Franklin's time the article was not produced in England, and the Queen graciously deigned to wear a gown from the manufactures of the provinces. Indeed, England is said to be indebted for the introduction of this manufacture, to a brace of public-spirited monks, the last people in the world one would naturally suspect of catering to the feminine love of dress and finery, who, however, took the trouble to carry the silk worms' eggs from China in a hollow cane. Had they never heard of Heliogabalus, or did they think the English nation superior to such frivolities? Or were they emulous of those other two monks who, ages before, brought the means of teaching the craft of silk-making from the Indies to Constantinople? Or are they the same doughty pair, whom a slight anachronism has uprooted from the sixth and set down in the seventeenth century? Indeed, the history of silk is wrapped in romance and mystery. It is a Chinese empress who invents it twenty seven hundred years before the Christian era, it is the monks who come out of their cells, leave their vespers and visions, in order to introduce the silk culture to the nations. When Miss Turbelow puts on her gown of satin brocade, which once signified a stuff woven entirely of gold and silver with silk, do the wraiths of the almond-eyed empress and the cowled priests pursue her, seem en rapport with her? The monks being the most learned people of their age, were perhaps also the thinkers, and foresaw the advantage the culture would prove to whatever country it was introduced into, the employment it would give. Workmen completed the work of the priests by carrying the industry into Italy and France [?], which latter country once had a [?] monopoly of silk. In fact, the [unreadable] is far descended; all the [unreadable] civilizations of the world [unreadable] labored to bequeath [unreadable]. It is an heirloom which [unreadable] only queens and nabobs, [unreadable] but which progress is [unreadable] within reach of maid [unreadable] mistress. Its popularity is [unreadable] only to its expense; it is due chiefly to an innate love in the human heart of soft and lustrous fabrics, and as much as anything to its durability. One is always well dressed in it, but not too well, and even a shabby one carries in its cracks shininess an air of respectability and refinement. -Harper's Bazar. |