to the rest of
the figure. The common mistake lies in considering it a beauty in a
large woman of massive proportions. A few centuries ago women did not
take a scientific view of things, and fell into delusions which in this
age are a disgrace to the sex. They knew nothing of anatomy, of the law
of proportion or of the curve of beauty, and they misunderstood the
language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the
whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly
praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a
small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or
where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of
praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful
smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master
Wither included in the attractions of her who had left him,

Her wast exceeding small,
The fives did fit her shoo;
But now, alasse! sh'as left me.

This suits exactly the modern view of a small waist and a No. 5 shoe.

In the well-known Scotch ballad "Edom o' Gordon" the Lady Rodes is
represented as being shut up by Gordon in her burning castle. The smoke
was suffocating when,

Oh than bespaik her dochter dear:
She was baith jimp and sma', etc.

Here it might be said that the evident youth of the girl, who was
dropped over the wall and fell on the point of the cruel Gordon's spear,
accounts for her being "jimp and sma'." The explanation will not apply
to "The Cruel Sister," as given by Sir Walter Scott:

She took her by the middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

So fascinated was the rhymer by that special feature of her beauty that
he returns to it after recounting how the elder sister drowned the
younger:

You could not see her middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
Her gouden girdle was so bra,
By the bonny milldams of Binnorie.

Another instance is in the opening verse of Sir Walter Scott's version
of "The Lass of Lochroyan:"

Oh wha will shoe my bonny foot?
And wha will glove my hand?
And wha will lace my middle jimp
Wi' a lang, lang linen band?

The last line appears to indicate the use of a linen band, as the Roman
ladies used the _strophium_, a broad ribbon tied round the breast as a
support. From this