that has led to the high heels, but the remedy is worse than the disease. It does not really give the impression of long-leggedness, and it does alter and spoil the whole carriage of the body.
The high heels also help to deform the feet by pressing the toes forward into the pointed ends of those terrible boots that are another disgrace to our civilisation. Painters and sculptors have good cause to know that the modern female foot is a hideous object—our vitiated taste has become accustomed to it when clothed, but when seen in its naked deformity it is a thing to shudder at.
It occurs to me that there are two fundamental rules of dress.
Fig 4.
First, wherever the dress is tight it should show the true natural form of the body beneath, and should not suggest, and still less produce, some entirely unnatural and artificial form. (This rule, of course, only applies to tolerably good figures.)
Secondly, where the dress is loose it should be allowed to fall in its own natural folds, and should not be gathered up into the horrible convolutions miscalled drapery by the milliners.
The old Greek dress fulfilled these conditions in the highest degree, and, I have no doubt, was the noblest form of clothing ever invented. All other forms of dress have abounded in monstrosities of one kind or another, but in looking over the history of costume one now and then comes across some simple and artistic form which seems to have sprung up by chance, as it were, or as a transition between two opposite exaggerations. Here is a fine example from the early middle ages (Fig. 3). And here, again, is a good design from a much later period (Fig. 4).
Fig 5.
Just before the introduction of the enormous hoops in the early part of the eighteenth century, which, perhaps, are the high-water mark of monstrosity in dress, there was a brief period of comparative simplicity, to which has been given a perhaps factitious charm by the genius of Watteau (Fig. 5). And then, again, we come to the costume of 1800 and the neighbouring years, to which I have already alluded, and which was, perhaps, the simplest and most graceful dress that European women have worn since the classical period (Fig. 6), but which soon, alas! gave way to the succession of nightmares from which, at last, we seem to have awakened.
But from many styles besides these there are hints to be gathered for the benefit of modern dress, and, fortunately, the tolerance
