absurd impression that they are adding to its beauty. The flat-headed Indian compresses the forehead, the Chinese ladies the foot, and the European ladies the waist; whilst other races either paint the eyebrows, dye the nails, distend the ears, or tattoo the face, under the same barbarous idea. Now, no mutilating of the body of this kind can do anything but injure and render it ugly. And, of all the customs that we have alluded to, there is none perhaps more injurious than that of compressing the chest and waist; and yet, from the absurd idea that fashion is displayed, or beauty augmented, this unnatural course is persisted in, and corsets are still worn that have as little relation to the human form as the stiff, boned, boarded, and leather stays which were worn three centuries ago.
It must also be borne in mind that if satire and invective could have cured the ladies of this custom, it would have been driven out of the world ages ago. The first English poet whose works have come down to us, has abused the ladies soundly for their extravagance in dress, fasting, and bleeding, to make themselves look pale, and tightening their waists and breasts, and dyeing their hair yellow. And a French moralist, writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, says, "Another evil is to the body. By detestable vanity ladies of rank now cause their robes to be made so low in the breast, and so open on the shoulders, that we may see nearly the whole bosom, and much of their shoulders and necks, and much below down their backs, and so tight in the waist that they can scarcely respire in them, and often suffer great pain by it." But neither the satire of the poet, the sober warning of the moralist, the preaching of the monks, who went through Europe exposing the abominations of the fashionable costume, nor even the pain occasioned by the unnatural compression, and the danger, to say nothing of the indelicacy, of leaving the chest exposed, could ever cure the evil, and for this simple reason—they only pointed out the wrong and left the right method of dressing undiscovered. We may take it for granted that people must and will dress elegantly if they have the means of doing so, and it is perfectly right that they should. We have no puritanical crusade to preach against display and elegance; but when health is sacrificed to fashion, and the grace and beauty of nature marred by a barbarous practice, which has come down to us from a time when physiology was unknown; and the true conditions of human well-being not understood, we may
