SPEECH AND SONG. 249 



men breathe differently from women, the former using the ab- 

 dominal method that is, pushing down the diaphragm and the 

 latter doing most of the work with their upper ribs. One reason 

 of this difference is that the fair sex insist on fixing their lower 

 ribs, to which the diaphragm is attached, with stays, which make 

 free movement of that muscle impossible. Doctors have fulmi- 

 nated against tight-lacing for the last three centuries,* but to as 

 little purpose as the Archbishop of Kheims thundered against the 

 jackdaw. Fashion must be obeyed, whatever its victims may 

 have to suffer. It is right to state, however, that stays not long 

 ago found a champion in no less a person than the Professor of 

 Pathology in the University of Cambridge. Professor Roy caused 

 a little mild scandal at the last meeting of the British Association 

 by urging that the use of stays might have certain advantages. 

 If the Archbishop of Canterbury had stood up in Convocation and 

 denied the efficacy of baptism, he could not have shocked his 

 hearers more than Dr. Roy did by such a profession of heresy. 

 The scientific ladies, who resemble the Greek statues in the loose- 

 ness of their waists if in nothing else, groaned over this backslid- 

 ing in high places, and their more frivolous sisters rejoiced. A 

 Defender of the Faith, however, opportunely appeared in the per- 

 son of Dr. Garson, who at once put the question to the touch by 

 measurements made on a number of ladies and gentlemen then 

 present. These showed that the vital capacity (which is measured 

 by the quantity of air that can be expelled from the lungs after 

 the deepest possible inspiration) was considerably greater in the 

 men than in the women, and that while in the former there was a 

 constant diminution in the vital capacity in every period of ten 

 years after the age of thirty, in the latter it actually increased 

 after fifty, a time of life at which the majority of ladies begin to 

 think more of comfort than of restraining the exuberance of their 

 " figure." The truth appears to be, however, that the slight press- 

 ure exercised by stays does not matter in the case of ladies who 

 are not called upon to use their voices professionally, and who do 

 not care to excel as amateurs. In the ordinary work of life stays 

 do not cause any inconvenience, and it is only when they are ab- 

 surdly tight that they do serious harm to the internal organs. In 

 the case of the artiste it is quite otherwise ; here anything which 



* Stays are generally said to have been introduced by Catherine de Medicis, who may be 

 supposed to have had a natural genius for the invention of instruments of torture. They 

 were, however, in use long before her time. I have in my possession a drawing made for 

 me in 1884 by Mr. Lewis Wingfield from a MS. in the British Museum of the date 1043. 

 It is figured by Strutt, who calls it " A Droll Devil." Mr. Wingfield more aptly terms it 

 the " Fiend of Fashion." It represents a figure fantastically dressed in what, I suppose, 

 was the height of fashion of the day. Its special interest in connection with the present 

 subject is that it wears a pair of stays, laced up in front, and of sufficient constrictive power 

 to please a modern mondaine. 



