in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go, at a breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my complaint against the ‘gorgeous’ pedants was that they regarded their preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way.”[1]
To those of us who recall the plain Boston of those days there is something quite unexpected in thus fastening upon Margaret Fuller’s circle the sin of gorgeousness. Whence came this vehement epithet, so hopelessly inconsistent with the well-kept black silk or modest alpaca of that period. It apparently came from the exuberant phrase of one young admirer quoted in the “Memoirs” of Margaret Fuller, who went so far as to say of her idol, “Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed, and altogether looked sumptuously.”[2] Even sumptuousness, it might be said, is not gorgeousness; and there were, moreover, young girls in Boston to whom what has since been called “the gospel of good gowns” was then very imperfectly revealed, and who so adored their teacher that she would have looked superbly in her oldest Groton wardrobe; just as when she was fifteen, the younger school girls admired her way of coming into school and her half-
