of form with regard to this main article of dress, as men
have; they have been volatile enough in the material, and colour, and
ornament of their gowns; but in shape and cut they have kept much nearer
to the golden rule of comfort and utility than the lords of the creation.
The period of greatest aberration in this matter may be taken as extending
from the latter quarter of the seventeenth century to the end of the
eighteenth. During those long years, absurdity and inconvenience seemed to
hold paramount sway in the wardrobes of the fair; and to apply the word
"taste," in its good sense, to any portion of the female dress, at least
in England, is hardly allowable within the limits mentioned. Look at your
grandmothers' pictures, or turn over the leaves of any edition of
Hogarth's works, and the broadness of the caricature cannot fail to strike
you. That women should ever have consented so greatly to travestie the
beautiful proportions of their fair frames; that they should ever have so
completely lost sight of the main principles of decoration and comeliness,
is inconceivable. The mischief all originated in France; and it must have
come, in the first instance, from the deformity, either of body or mind,
of some crabbed old dowager at Versailles; no young unsophisticated girl
would ever of herself have invented the hoop or the _neglige_. But those
times have happily gone by; and after passing through a transition state
of minor absurdity--(look to the prints of the _Belle Assemblee_ from 1800
to 1815)--we have thrown away all unnatural short waists; we have
discarded scanty skirts; stomachers have been sent nearly to the right
about; and with the exception of a single opisthodomic folly--to which we
do not care to allude more particularly--our better halves, and our fair
friends, seem to have entered upon an age of good taste and good sense.
The happy change has been brought about partly by some women of good sense
consulting their own ideas of utility and simplicity--partly by a return
of public taste to the dresses of the middle ages, and also of the times
of Charles the First. Ladies have at length become aware, that novelty of
form is not essential to beauty of effect--and they have opened their eyes
to the truth, that the less they disfigure the proportions of their
persons, the more becomingly and the more comfortably will they be clad.

The main divisions of lady's gown--every milliner understands what we
mean--are t