to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever
may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in this connection
to such popular predilection as there may be for the dignified
(leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by vulgar tradition
associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure
accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements
of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head,
and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of
itemized appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities
which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued
by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female beauty is a
robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of appreciation is the physique,
while the conformation of the face is of secondary weight only. A
well-known instance of this ideal of the early predatory culture is that
of the maidens of the Homeric poems.

This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when, in the
conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife comes to be a
vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics
which are supposed to result from or to go with a life of leisure
consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may
be gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of
the chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to be
scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or
romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and
dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet,
the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured
representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic
imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated
to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still
extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern
industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained
its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities which are least
advanced in point of economic and civil development, and which show the
most considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing
com