Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/212

 Clothes, which, according to Mr. Carlyle's favorite hero, Herr Teufeldröck, and (dare we add?) the verdict of many a fair one, simply includes most that is important in this sublunary sphere. Nevertheless, we cannot altogether escape it. It meets us just now in considering how best to protect the skin against outside influences, and we must, perforce, give it attention.

The underclothing—we mean its deepest strata in immediate contiguity to the body—has quite as much to do with a person's comfort, health, and good looks, and consequently with his or her success in life, as the outside apparel, public opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. It is pertinent, here as elsewhere, to look beneath the surface to form our judgment of the individual.

Cleanliness we take for granted. "Foul linen" and healthy skin are incompatibles. Falstaff himself, whose stomach was not easily turned, could not abide the "rank compound of villainous smells" which he suffered in the buck-basket. No excuse, short of that of Queen Isabella, is valid for not changing the underclothing every week. Isabella, daughter of Philip II., wife of the Archduke Albert, swore by the Virgin and all the saints that until her royal husband should reduce the refractory citizens of Ostend, to which he was diligently laying siege, she would not remove a stitch of her clothing.

The stiff-necked burghers proved of doughtier mettle