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XVII in gold chenille or silk. The Directoire period produced a classic zone worn outside the dress, a mode that soon gave place to the boneless corset, a fleeting fancy, for all costume worn in the time of Louis XVI. owes its greatest charm to the stays, the bodices being cut into long points and fitted tightly from bust to waist. In some instances these bodices were sewn on to the figure of the wearer after the stays had been laced to their extreme limit, and many of Hogarth's figures prove the influence of the very stiffs stay, the figures being erect in an uncomfortable degree, for it is impossible to imagine any human creature achieving such excellence of carriage without considerable support from without, and some inconvenience from within.

In the later days of the eighteenth century greater comfort was granted, when the short-waisted dress prevailed, together with the most laudable ambition to copy the flowing elegance of the classic period. But the rule of ease did not obtain long, and in the early times of the nineteenth century the fashion of tight lacing was revived with enthusiasm, stays being composed of bars of iron and steel with the tops stiffly steeled so that the shoulder-straps might be dispensed with. Women suffered a craze for compression, until the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, when its influence was somewhat less essential by reason of the ubiquity of the crinoline, which gave a semblance of the small waist to the least slender.

The crinoline boasts as its great-great-grand-mother the farthingale or vertingale, which was worn in France in the reign of Henry II., when