FEMININE DRESS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 11481, 14 January 1903, Page 10

FEMININE DRESS.

TO THE EDITOR OP !THK PRESS. Sir,— I am, like ninety-nine and seveneighth per cent, of men, en ardent admirer ol women; I can even go the length of Mark Twain, and say "I love the ccx, irrespective of age or colour." It eeem« to us mere mortals that when God created women he put the coping-stone on his finished work. Woman, in her original human form divine, was something not only to admire, but to reverence, and woman has not much altered from the time of Eve. I am inclined to think she has improved. But she, with the inconsistency peculiar to her sex, triea to improve on Nature, and, although still adorable, she does not euceet'd in her efforts. Hence the correspondence in your column* of late. That "monster custom" has all to do with it. 'lo be out of the fashion is, to a woman, a calamity. Thus she adopts prevailing ideas, and doas straight-front corsets and other devices; ar.d what is man that he rfiould criticise her? Husbands like to tee Uieir wives well and fashionably dressed. But still man does criticise her, and generally under a nom-ile'plunie, us I do; possibly bashfuliiesrt prompts the nom-de-pluwie. Certainly the peculiar gait acquired by some of our fashionable ladies who wear tiw straight-front corsets is purely an invention, emphasised as it is by the way they grab their drees btlunci and below the hip. and to which one of your correspondents objects and says is indecent. I do not think it is indecent. HatlicT it is ."-ugijestivt' of immodesty, and is, T think, nearly always quite unintentional of any .su.-h thing. Woman wn vain-ir, because more ignorant, centuries agu than .>.!«.' is now, as the time then givi'.s proof. .Sluikt'jspeare, through Hamlet, Minis ilitm up:—"l have heard of your paintings, too, well enough; God has given you ont , face, and you made yourselves another. You gig, you amb'.o, and you lisp and nickname God's creature. , *, and make your wantonness your ignorance," and then Hamlet consigns them to a nunnery. But perii.ip.s Hamlet was mad. Th?y certainly do "amble." Xot Uiat I personally object. Possibly they paint; I do not seek to enquire. At;e gives experience, and I have learned not to enquire too closely into many things. aL-o tliey do not hold the "mirror up to nature, ,, and might, with advantage, walk as God intended them to walk. But. taken as they lira in the present niode. they are incomparable and adorable, with which remark 1 close.—Yours, etc., MIUDLARK.