TIGHT STAYS, AND CRAVATS. 185 



counterpart to it. When the moralist shall 

 have made his tour through these regions, 

 where a most lamentable deficiency of common 

 sense in the proper application of wearing 

 apparel has exposed the frame of civilised man 

 to all the horrors of spinal curvature and 

 decrepitude, let him repair to the forests of 

 Guiana, in which Nature has had her own 

 way in training the human frame. During the 

 whole of the time I spent in those interminable 

 wilds, I never observed a female, either young 

 or old, who was labouring under a complaint of 

 the spine. These obedient children of good 

 Dame Nature have never had their better 

 judgment warped by the sophistry of the advo- 

 cates of fashion, nor their vanity punished by 

 deformity. Not a single pair of stays, nor any 

 thing resembling them, did I see during my 

 wanderings in that uncivilised part of the globe. 



Oh, it makes an honest man's heart ache to 

 see his fellow-creatures cheated out of their 

 birthright by the intrigues of fashion. Can 

 there be a sight in all nature more sad and 

 melancholy than to behold the beauteous female 

 form sinking gradually into the tomb through 

 the indiscreet application of ligature to those 



o 



