time to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through this one
cause of enforced silence. Some cause or other there must be for the
amount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails especially among girls
of the middle classes in towns, who have not, poor things, the
opportunities which richer girls have, of keeping themselves in strong
health by riding, skating, archery--that last quite an admirable exercise
for the chest and lungs, and far preferable to croquet, which involves
too much unwholesome stooping.--Even playing at ball, if milliners and
shop-girls had room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, might
bring fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek. I
spoke just now of the Greeks. I suppose you will all allow that the
Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the world
ever saw. Every educated man knows that they were also the cleverest of
all races; and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature.

Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual education a
science as well as a study. Their women practised graceful, and in some
cases even athletic, exercises. They developed, by a free and healthy
life, those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models of
human beauty: but--to come to my third point--they wore no stays. The
first mention of stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear
old Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about four
hundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when he was
shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of the
passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them a
slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as you
may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in any
street in a British town. And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhood
found her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, with
astonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which it