stance--it will easily be seen how
much dignity is conferred by length. The utility of long skirts is not so
easy to be proved as their beauty; but this is only on the score of the
difficulty in keeping them clean; as for warmth and comfort, the advantage
is quite on their side. Our fair contemporaries, however, seem to have
arrived at a reasonable and happy medium upon that point; they never wore
better-formed skirts than at the present day. A gown, if properly made,
and without any stinting of stuff, and if that stuff have any thing like
substance, needs no adventitious aids to give it sufficient amplitude of
contour; let our gentle readers take the hint; they will otherwise
militate against one of the main laws of good taste. Let them only look at
the portraits of their ancestors in the middle of the last century but
one--let them look at Hollar's prints, and if they are open to conviction
they will agree in what we say.

If the skirt is to be ample, the body should be confined to the natural
shape of the human frame; and the more nearly it is so, the more graceful
and effective will it become. Do what we will, distort the sleeves and
waist as much as we may, we shall never come up to the symmetry of Dame
Nature; she is a better milliner than any in Regent Street; and if the
ladies would have their corsages made after her pattern in all cases, they
would find their clothes fitting better, pinching less, and keeping them
much warmer. Women assert--and we are not competent to dispute the point
with them--that they need an enveloping support for the body; in fact,
that they must have corsets: be it so: there is no harm in the article
itself, provided the utility of it can be clearly proved; but there is
much harm in it, if, by an abuse of its powers, this same thing is made to
distort the body, and to injure the internal organization of the human
frame. As far as beauty of form is concerned, whatever intrenches on the
proportion of natural shape is intrinsically contradictory to it: let no
woman imagine that she has a fine figure, if she can lace herself into a
diameter of nine or ten inches; for by so doing, she disturbs the harmony
of all the curves--all the lines of beauty, as Hogarth calls them--with
which she has been so richly endowed; she fails of her effect, and,
instead of beauty, produces only absurdity. Still the corsage of her dress
should fit close; and for this to be possible, there must be a
well-fitting c