pe eeeeeeooooooooeems* 
KIDD’S OWN JOURNAL. 143 
ol AIR a mr 
others have used our brain and unceasing 
activity—whereby they have gained their 
ends. Jn every case we have “paid the 
piper.” These are known and cruel facts. 
It is now time that we show an indepen- 
dence of action, however shallow may 
be our means of life. Whatever may be 
brought against us, it never will be said that 
we are not honest, sincere, a true friend, and 
purely natural. 
These qualifications will pull any man 
safely through—even such a world as ours ! 

THE LOVES AND THE GRACES. 
WHILST WE ARE HAMMERING AWAY at 
the outrages upon Nature committed by our 
Englishwomen, en masse—(those, we mean, 
who move in good society), our contem- 
porary, the Quarterly Review, is cleverly 
following us up. He draws anice distinction 
between beauty ina man, and beauty ina 
woman; and proves that the former are 
‘‘created” beautiful, although sleeping and 
waking their sole object is to deform their 
persons. 
We quite agree with this position. A 
woman’s countenance is beautiful—her busi- 
ness itis “¢o be beautiful.” Therefore was 
she made. WE make war upon the follies 
that prevent her being beautiful. Our con- 
temporary says :— 
The Loves and the Graces are felt to reside 
naturally in a woman's countenance, but to be 
quite out of place in a man’s. His face is bound 
to be clean,* and may be allowed to be pictu- 
resque—but it is a woman’s business to be beau- 
tiful. Beauty of some kind is so much the attri- 
bute of the sex, that a woman can hardly be said 
to feel herself a woman who has not, at one time 
of her life at all events, felt herself to be far. 
Beauty confers an education of its own, and 
that always a feminine one. Most celebrated 
beauties have owed their highest charms to the 
refining education which their native ones have 
given them. It was the wisdom as well as the 
poetry of the age of chivalry, that 2 supposed all 
women to be beautiful, and treated them as such. 
A woman is not fully furnished for her part in life, 
whose heart has not occasionally swelled with the 
sense of possessing some natural abilities in the 
art of pleasing ; opening to her knowledge secrets 
of strength, wonderfully intended to balance her 
muscular, or, if you will, her general weakness. 
And herein we see, how truly this attribute be- 
longs to woman alone. Man does not need such a 
consciousness, and seldom has it without rendering 
himself most extremely ridiculous; while to a 
woman it is one of the chief weapons in armoury, 
deprived of which she is comparatively powerless. 
And it is not nature which thus deprives her. 
* Hear this, ye advocates for making a man’s 
face hairy as a savage, and doing away with the 
use of the razor and soap. A maAn’s face must 
be “clean,” pure, natural, wholesome.—Ep. K. J. 



Few, and solitary as sad, are the cases when 
a woman is stamped by nature as an outcast from 
her people, and such a one is understood not to 
enter the lists. But it is a perverse system of 
education which starts with the avowed principle 
of stifling nature. 
Here is the grand fault. The very first 
effort of a girl’s parents is to stifle nature 
in their offspring. How then can “ Woman” 
fulfil her mission—her mission “to be beau- 
tiful?”’ It is impossible; as we proved last 
month, whilst sitting in judgment upon the 
prevailing want of taste in the arrangement 
of ladies’ hair. Most of our women—if not 
known to be such, would, if their heads only 
were seen, pass admirably for monkeys. 
There can be no two opinions about that ; 
and dressed as they are from the head 
downward, we could, were we ill-natured, 
make a further apt comparison. Weseldom 
hear of “‘elopements’ under the reigning 
fashion. A woman’s head and face have 
lost all their wonted attraction. We fear 
their owners have read the ‘‘ Comic English 
Grammar,” and studded it too severely. It 
surely zs recorded there, that “ the masculine 
is more worthy than the feminine.” 
Our contemporary next attacks the silly 
practice of those disgusting prudes (all 
prudes are disgusting), who instil the idea 
that it is wicked to show a consciousness of 
beauty; and who maintain that it is right to 
“mortify the flesh.” Then speaketh he 
about plainness, as contra distinguished from 
beauty :— 
What can be more false or cruel than the com- 
mon plan of forcing upon a young girl the wither- 
ing conviction of her own plainness? If this be 
only a foolish ‘‘ sham” to counteract the supposed 
demoralising consciousness of beauty, the world 
will soon counteract that. But if the victim have 
really but a scanty supply of charms, it will, in 
addition to incalculable anguish of mind, only 
diminish those further still, To such a system 
alone can we ascribe an unhappy, anomalous 
style of a young woman, occasionally met with, 
who seems to have taken on herself the vows of 
voluntary ugliness—who neither eats enough to 
keep her complexion clear, nor smiles enough to 
set her pleasing muscles in action—who prides 
herself on a skinny parsimony of attire, which 
she calls neatness—thinks that alone respectable 
which is most unbecoming—is always thin, and 
seldom well, and passes through the society of 
the lovely, the graceful, and the happy, with the 
vanity that apes humility on her pale, dis- 
appointed countenance, as if to say—‘ Stand 
back! I am uncomelier than thou!” 
Yet even such self-disfiguring ladies as these 
instinctively obey that law of nature which bids 
a woman hide her face when she knows it not to 
be attractive. Even these cry into their pocket 
handkerchiefs and sneeze behind their hands; not 
because they are ashamed of either emotion, but 
simply because such paroxysms of the counte- 
nance are too ugly for the light. 
Let us here add one word of our 

