past physicians should have been telling them of the folly of what
they have been doing; and that they should as yet, in the great
majority of cases, not only turn a deaf ear to all warnings, but
actually deny the offence, of which one glance of the physician or
the sculptor, who know what shape the human body ought to be,
brings them in guilty--this, I say, is an instance of--what shall
I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of the
satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made
the physical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common
sense for a moment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog,
whether for strength, for speed, or for any other useful purpose,
the first thing almost to be looked at is the girth round the
ribs; the room for heart and lungs. Exactly in proportion to that
will be the animal's general healthiness, power of endurance, and
value in many other ways. If you will look at eminent lawyers and
famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age, you will see
that in every case they are men, like the late Lord Palmerston,
and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not merely in
the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had,
therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to
clear the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole
body. Now, it is just these lower ribs, across which the
diaphragm is stretched like the head of a drum, which stays
contract to a minimum. If you advised owners of horses and hounds
to put their horses or their hounds into stays, and lace them up
tight, in order to increase their beauty, you would receive, I
doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very decided, refusal
to do that which would spoil not merely the animals themselves,
but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come. And if
you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no