ign;
Thy false one inclines to a swain
Whose music is sweeter than thine.

90 One of the most humourous of these is the paper on Hoops, which, the
_Spectator_ tells us, particularly pleased his friend SIR ROGER:

"MR. SPECTATOR--

"You have diverted the town almost a whole month at the expense of
the country; it is now high time that you should give the country
their revenge. Since your withdrawing from this place, the fair sex
are run into great extravagances. Their petticoats, which began to
heave and swell before you left us, are now blown up into a most
enormous concave, and rise every day more and more; in short, sir,
since our women knew themselves to be out of the eye of the
SPECTATOR, they will be kept within no compass. You praised them a
little too soon, for the modesty of their headdresses; for as the
humour of a sick person is often driven out of one limb into
another, their superfluity of ornaments, instead of being entirely
banished, seems only fallen from their heads upon their lower parts.
What they have lost in height they make up in breadth, and, contrary
to all rules of architecture, widen the foundations at the same time
that they shorten the superstructure.

"The women give out, in defence of these wide bottoms, that they are
very airy and very proper for the season; but this I look upon to be
only a pretence and a piece of art, for it is well known we have not
had a more moderate summer these many years, so that it is certain
the heat they complain of cannot be in the weather; besides, I would
fain ask these tender-constitutioned ladies, why they should require
more cooling than their mothers before them?

"I find several speculative persons are of opinion that our sex has
of late years been very saucy, and that the hoop-petticoat is made
use of to keep us at a distance. It is most certain that a woman's
honour cannot be better entrenched than after this manner, in circle
within circle, amidst such a variety of outworks and lines of
circumvallation. A female who is thus invested in whalebone is
sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill-bred fellow,
who might as well think of Sir George Etheridge's way of making love
in a tub as in the midst of so many hoops.

"Among