"stays of steel which arm Aurelia with a shape
to kill" were held good work for the
"Mulcibers" in the Minories, and that Aurelia was
all the more killing the less her shape was
according to nature, and the more substantially
deformed the Mulcibers and the steel stays could
made her. In the court of Louis the Sixteenth
the completeness of the feminine costume
depended on the form of the stays. For many
years before this—in fact, from the beginning
of the eighteenth century—staymakers had used
a thick leather, called bend, about a quarter of an
inch thick, and not unlike shoe-sole leather, for
their stays.

The French Revolution, tainted with many
follies and disgraced by many infamies, did
yet try after a more radical and centralised
principle of life; and, among other things,
for a more rational costume; going back
for this to the pure and graceful forms of
Grecian drapery. This was so far an advantage,
as that it did away with the artificial necessity
for a minute waist, and abolished cages, bustles,
farthingales, and the whole host of petticoat
inflators. The bodice loose, the waist short
—too short—the skirt untrimmed and long—too
long, seeing that useless yards of train trailed on
the ground, just as at the present time, when
useless yards trail and men's lives are a
burden to them by reason of perpetual entanglement
and consequent rebuke—long gloves up
to the elbow, and classically arranged hair;
this was the costume of the French revolution
in its highest and most æsthetic aspect. Then
came the more fantastic mode of the Empire;
and then, in 1810, tight-lacing broke out again
with redoubled fury, and stays were made, not
of whalebone nor of leather, but of steel and
iron bars from three to four inches broad, and
some not less than eighteen inches long. It was
no uncommon thing to see a mother lay her
daughter on the floor, put her foot on her back,
and break half a dozen laces in tightening her
stays! Eighteen inches for the waist was again
set up as the standard of elegance; and the
staymakers put all their art and ingenuity into
making the corset an instrument of even more
profound torture than formerly.

"About this time it was the custom of some
fashionable staymakers to sew a narrow, stiff,
curved bar of steel along the upper edge of the
stays, which, extending back to the shoulders
on each side, effectually kept them back, and
rendered the use of shoulder-straps superfluous.
The slightest tendency to stoop was at once
corrected by the use of the backboard, which
was strapped flat against the back of the waist
and shoulders, extending up the back of the
neck, where a steel ring, covered with leather,
projected to the front, and encircled the throat."
Towards the end of George the Third's reign,
gentlemen as well as ladies put themselves into
stays, and the practice has always been more or
less followed throughout the Continent. As
long ago as 1760 it was the fashion in Berlin
and Holland to choose the handsomest boy in
the family for tight-lacing, just as it is the
fashion in China for even the poorest families to
pick out one girl for the "golden water-lilies,"
in which the Celestials delight, and by which
pretty euphemism they choose to designate their
hideous mutilation of female feet. Prince de
Ligne and Prince Kaunitz were invariably
encased in most expensively made satin corsets;
the former wearing black, and the latter white.
Dr. Doran calls the officers of Gustavus Adolphus
"the tightest-laced exquisites of suffering
Humanity." In many things we of these times
have improved on the past, without a shadow of
doubt; but in crinolines and stays? Questionable.
At all events, let us consult the marvelously
funny evidence collected at the end of a
book called The Corset and the Crinoline, from
which we have been borrowing solemn facts,
and see what certain people affirm by personal
experience to be still the fashion and the practice
in England.

In The Englishwoman's Magazine of
November, 1867, is a letter from an English
gentleman, who has been educated at Vienna,
and who writes to detail his experience of
stays. It is all very well, he says, for strong-
minded women who have never worn a pair
of stays, or for gentlemen blinded by hastily
formed prejudices, to anathematise an article
of dress of the good qualities of which they
are utterly ignorant, and which, consequently,
they cannot appreciate; but let them try
before they condemn; let them go, as this
special gentleman went, to Vienna, be, as
he was, tightly laced up in a fashionable Viennese
corset by a sturdy Viennese mädchen, and
though, at the first, still as he, they would
probably feel ill at ease and awkward, and the
daily lacing tighter and tighter would produce
pain and inconvenience, yet in time they would
not only grow accustomed to it, but be as
anxious as any of the others "to have their
corsets laced as tightly as a pair of strong
arms could draw them." Then they would say
with him, that the "sensation of being tightly
laced in an elegant well-made tightly-fitting
pair of corsets is superb." The author of The
Corset and the Crinoline further assures its
readers that many English boys who have been
educated on the Continent, and have there
became accustomed to the use of corsets, still keep
up the practice here at home; and that we have
a whole generation of such corset-wearers, who
lace themselves as tightly as the most wasp-
waisted woman, quite unsuspected by the world
at large.

Another correspondent in the same paper, a
lady this time, gives her experience. As her
parents were in India, she had no one to
particularly care for her, and was therefore allowed,
she says, "to attain the age of fourteen before
any care was bestowed on her figure."
Fortunately for her (?), the return home of her father
and mother saved her from growing into a
clumsy, inelegant girl; for her mamma was so
shocked at her appearance that she took the
unusual plan of making her sleep in her corset.
At first she suffered what she mildly terms
''considerable discomfort," for the stays were
extra stiff, filled with whalebone, and furnished