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26 :"Ladies and Gentlemen,

"I congratulate my good fortune in that I have the honour to speak before so polite an audience upon a theme whose diameter and circumference afford so large a scope to eloquence. Were I to handle it inch by inch, my speech would swell in proportion to the amplitude of my subject, and I should feel myself encircled with a luxurious circle of tropes and figures, round and magnificent as the hoop I attempt to praise. "I have enquired at the most flourishing ware­houses, and consulted the most knowing coopers of the female sex; but I cannot distinctly learn to whose extensive genius the ladies are indebted for this invention of the hooped petticoat. The learned writers of antiquity are silent upon the occasion, which makes me conjecture that the glory of this pompous piece of elegancy is due to the moderns. M. Tournefort, in his Voyage through the Levant, gives a description of a figure of a very magnificent petticoat worn by the ladies of Myconia (fair islanders like yourselves), which may probably have been the original of yours. That, indeed, is full of plaits, and quilted from top to bottom; whereas yours is plain, which is after the grand gusto in structures of every kind.