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Rh ever, if that were possible. Pepys in his diary speaks of his wife's "waistcoat of black moyre, laced with silver lace so basely that I could not endure to see her." The incident to which these words refer is amusing and-very human. Pepys and his wife were going to see some striking pageant of the day, and when he looked at her bodice it produced so painful an impression upon him that he ordered her to take it off; whereupon the lady declined to comply with his command. Then ensued high words and a quarrel between the pair, with the result that neither of them went to see the show.

The farthingale accom­panied the stomacher, and by its enormously disproportionate breadth accentuated the waspishness of the waist. A writer of the seventeenth century tells us that great ladies wore "horrible overgrown vertigals [farthingales] of whalebone, which being put about the waist of the lady, and full as broad on both sides as she can reach with her hands, bear out her coats in such a manner that she appears to be as broad as long." The farthingale is said to have been made of a girdle of thick stuff-canvas, buckram, or some other strong material, ballooned out and stiffened by a circle of strong wire or bone, over which the skirts were suspended. This desolatingly hideous style of dress completely captured and fascinated the feminine taste, and enjoyed a very long period of popularity. Now and again it would seem to be going out, but only to revive again. It was still in vogue during Queen Anne's reign, when the tight-lacing of the waist was carried to such an extent that a lady's body from the shoulders to the hips looked like the letter V; and this of course was rendered all the more striking by the sudden fulness of the gown round that part of the body where it was gathered in folds. Sir Roger de Coverley is ungallant enough, in writing of his great-­grandmother, to declare that in her farthingale she appeared "as if she stood in a drum." In the latter days of Anne, waists, although tightly laced, did not appear quite so ugly, owing to the more graceful character of the skirts.

All classes, however, wore the stiff stays up to the time of George II. and even later, no radical change being brought about until the French Revolution, which introduced new departures in fashions as in other things. The Lady's Magazine for March, 1774, chronicles that "stays are high behind and very low before," and goes on to speak of "the body being tightly confined in stays, strengthened with steel busks." The characteristic of these days may be said to be stiffness, and young ladies were taught stiff­ness of manner and deportment as an essential part of their education. It is even reported that girls at school had a long needle stuck upright in the bosom of their frocks to prevent them from stooping too much! A curiously significant note of the time may also be seen in the statement that in 1772 the States General of Holland authorised a loan of six hundred thousand florins "to sustain a company formed at Ostfrise for the whale-fishery, which was every day increasing in importance in consequence of the extraordinary demand for whalebone used in the cerceaux [hoops] of women."

With the Revolution there came about an entire change in waists. "Back to nature! Back to nature!" was the cry; and no way of dressing the figure seemed so entirely according to the teachings of nature as that of the ancient Greeks, so a modification or the classical girdle was introduced, but it was worn higher than the zona.