254 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
prejudices in favour of long hair over “ touzled fringes,” or 
an imitation of boys, or some of the other ugly vagaries which 
come into fashion for a little while and then die out and never 
revive; which is probably the best test to apply to any 
doubtful fashion as a matter of real beauty. 
The same cannot be said of the constant admiration of what 
has always been understood by the common phrase, ‘‘a good 
figure,’ or ‘a fine shape,” as it used to be called in the 
novels of the last century, and its consequent cultivation by 
various exercises and still more artificial means. Those who 
have occasionally seen the controversial articles and letters in 
sundry periodicals in favour and in derision of the Rational 
Dress-Reformers (we must take care to put the hyphen in the 
right place) will have read, or may know independently, that 
the very same kind of epithets and descriptions were applied 
to the figures of female beauties and their cultivation by the 
oldest Greek and Roman poets and other writers, and by the 
medizeval and later ones, and by satirists and philosophers of 
the “rational dress” order, for nearly 1000 years up to the 
present day, and that the fashions they denounce have only 
varied in intensity from time to time. Notwithstanding such 
variations, and in spite of both satirists and philosophers in 
all ages, I suppose one could not find in all literature any 
admiration expressed of what everybody now understands by 
the common phrase “a bad figure.” It matters nothing 
for this purpose whether those who denounce or those who 
advocate artificial means of improving it are right. Some of 
the strongest denouncers avow themselves admirers of the 
very same result when they believe it to be natural; and 
others lament that their scolding produces no effect beyond 
apparently intensifying the fashion they revile by evoking 
contradictions said to be grounded on experience as to health, 
however contrary to theory and w priord probabilities. 
All this goes to prove that there has been no material varia- 
tion in the estimate of beauty of either face or figure in the 
civilised nations of the world in any known period, and that — 
when people talk of the proverbial mutability of taste and 
fashion, it really means taste and fashion in purely artificial 
things, like dress and furniture, and not in those which are 
chiefly made for us by nature; and it is the beauty of nature 
that we are talking of throughout. 
Therefore it is hardly necessary to consider also the variety 
of tastes in building, which again is purely artificial. Yet 
even in that we may trace more uniformity in taste in the 
long run than some people imagine. It does not follow that 
because only one style used generally to be in fashion in one 
