an elegant and naturally-fitting dress close to the body; and that this fashion continued for a long time may be seen from a figure given in Shaw's "Dresses of the Middle Ages"—that of Margaret, wife of St. Louis, King of France, A.D. 1234.
A glance at those figures will show at once that it is possible to compress the waist by lacing the dress too tight, as well as with stays. And it is possible—indeed to our mind certain—that corsets, such as those in present use, were not known at this period. A pious monk, however, has recorded two important facts relative to those dresses; the one is, that a fine lady in the habit of wearing them died, and as she had lived an ordinary life, her sins and merits fairly balanced in the scales of justice, until her clothes were thrown in, and then the fatal scale sunk loaded with her follies. The other lady meets her reward earlier, for a great knight, who was famous all over Europe, having obtained papa's consent, came for the purpose of marrying her, and, finding her very tight laced and unnaturally small in the waist, fell in love with her younger sister, who dressed in a more natural manner; and the lady, like many others, died a maid, the victim of her own vanity.
The first figure that we have met with, in which the corset may be fairly detected, is that of Constance, Queen of Castile, who, in 1372, married. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. From this it would appear that the custom of wearing them is of foreign, and not native origin; and this impression will be further confirmed by a study of the pure English dresses of the period. Almost a century after this, the Duchess of Gloucester may be seen (See Strutt, Plate XLIV.) dressed in an elegant and natural manner without corsets. When, however, they were once adopted, it was only natural, following other fashions, that they should run into extremes; and hence the waist was not only compressed and rendered unnaturally small, but rose and fell with the caprice of the times. At one time close up to the breasts, and at another down to the hips, it ascended and descended with the whim of the age; but the corset, for good or ill, always held its ground. The fardingale came in and went out, with a thousand other fashions, but the corset remains; and we doubt not but it will, when properly adapted to the body, remain as long as there are sensible ladies left in the world to wear it.
We should like, above all things, to possess a museum of old stays, beginning with the first rude effort of the savage to support the body,
