Pl. 8.
Not satisfied with the bustle in the upper part of the skirt, some ladies of the present day have returned to the old practice of wearing hoops, to make the dresses stand out at the base. These are easily recognized in the street by the “swagging”—no other term will exactly convey the idea—from side to side of the hoops, an effect which is distinctly visible as the wearer walks along. It is difficult to imagine what there is so attractive in the fardingale and hoop, that they should have prevailed, in some form or other, for so many years, and that they should have maintained their ground in spite of the cutting, though playful, raillery of the “Spectator,” and the jeers and caricatures of less refined censors of the eccentricities of dress. They were not recommended either by beauty of line or convenience, but by the tyrant Fashion, and we owe some gratitude to George IV., who banished the last relics of this singular fashion from the court dress, of which, until his time, it continued to form a part. Who could imagine that there would be an attempt to revive the hoop petticoat in the nineteenth century? We invite our readers to contrast the lines of the drapery in the figures after Vandyck, ([Figs. 60] and [61],) and those in the modern Greek costume, ([Figs. 51 and 54],) with that of a lady in a hoop, after a satirical painter, Hogarth, ([Fig. 68],) and two figures from a design by Jules David, in “Le Moniteur de la Mode,” a modern fashionable authority in dress. ([Figs. 69 and 70.]) There can be no doubt which is the most graceful. The width of the shoulders and the tight waist of the latter, will not escape the notice of our readers.
[CHAPTER V.]
THE FEET.
The same bad taste which insists upon a small waist, let the height and proportions of the figure be what they will, decrees that a small foot is essential to beauty.
Size is considered of more importance than form; and justly so if it is a sine qua non that the foot must be small, because the efforts that are made to diminish its size generally render it deformed. We have before mentioned that to endeavor to diminish the size of the human body in a particular part, is like tying a string round the middle of a pillow; it only makes it larger at the extremities. It is so with the waist, it is so with the foot. If it be crippled in length, or in width across the toes, it spreads over the instep and sides. The Italians and other nations of the south of Europe have smaller hands and feet than the Anglo-Saxons; and as this fact is generally known, it is astonishing that people of sense should persist in crippling themselves merely for the reputation of having small feet. Here again we have to complain of poets and romance writers; ladies would not have pinched their feet into small shoes, if these worthies had not sung the praises of “tiny feet.”
“Her feet, beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light.”
Nor are painters—portrait painters, we mean, and living ones too—it is needless however, to mention names—entirely free from blame for thus ministering to vanity and false taste. They have sacrificed truth to fashion in painting the feet smaller than they could possibly be in nature.
But it is not only with the endeavor to cripple their dimensions that we are inclined to quarrel. We object in toto to the shape of the shoe, which bears but little resemblance to that of the foot. We have heard persons say that they could never see any beauty in a foot. No wonder, when they saw none but those that were deformed by corns and bunions. How unlike is such a foot to the beautiful little—for little it really is in this case—fat foot of a child, before its beauty has been spoiled by shoes, or even to those of the barefooted children one sees so frequently in the street. Were it not for these opportunities of seeing nature we, in this country, should have but little idea of the true shape of the human foot, except what we learn from statues. According to a recent traveller, we must go to Egypt to see beautiful feet. It is impossible, he says, to see any thing more exquisite than the feet and hands of the female peasants. The same beauty is conspicuous in the Hindoo women.