Mr. Frederick Treves, of the London Hospital, in a lecture
on the dress of the period, delivered last Saturday, made a very judicious attack on the artificial narrowing of the waist, which is, indeed, not only injurious to the health, but positively ugly. At the same time, he cannot have been right in assuming that the waist of an average woman should be from twenty-eight to twenty-nine inches, if not artificially compressed. We do not believe that, as a matter of fact, the undoctored waist of a woman of average height is at all above twenty-five to twenty- seven inches ; and if so, it is a pity to represent it as naturally larger than it is, since the greater the revolution of habit is re- presented as being, the less disposed ordinary women will be to adopt it. Leave women the hope of something like a waist, and they may be willing to give up artificial modes of contracting it ; but leave them no hope of a waist without torture, and they may, perhaps, in their despair, prefer the torture to what they would consider the perpendicular architecture recommended by the doctors.
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