Anyone who has read "Sartor Retartus" and has absorbed a little of Carlyle's philosophy, must have wondered when ho was at some big social gathering, full of ladies in beautiful toilettes, and men in uniforme or the simpler conven. tional magpie costume, what would be the result if suddenly the touch of a magician's wand annihilated all the apparel and left the wearers in the original drosslessness of Adam and Eve, or what Artomas Ward called "the scandalous costume of the Greek Slave," the allusion being to Hiram Power's memorable statue. This thought has occurred to Mr. Dickberry, but instead of letting it pass away, ho has dwelt on it and worked it up into what he calls a "social rhapsody." To describe s great city like London at the beginning of the twentieth century peopled entirely by mon and women without any clothes or drapery of any kind, and to make the description seem so possible and consistent, that the reader feels that this is what must ha happened under such extraordinary cumstances, demands not only a fertile imagination, but unusual good taste, Mr,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.