The Express.
London, England, 1868-03-18 00:00:00

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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, MAR. 18.

OUR ZYGLISH GIRL&

IT is a common fault of vivacious mikes to
twatreat the morals of the age in which they live
with some dateless period of Arcadian simplicity.
They lament our present degeneracy and exhibit a
pretty picture of the faith and purity of former
days. Unfortunately the picture lacks the ele-
ment of truth, or if true at all is only true par-
'tally. Poets are especially prone to this vice
of looking backward, but then poets have
a license which we do not so wil-
lingly accord to prose writers and to journalists.
For a long time past, as our readers know, the
itiotnnifot Reimr has deplored in no measured lan-
allege, the state of female society is England. We
have been told again and again that the fashion-
able young lady of the pement day is " fast " in
mmners and in conversel ion, that she talks slang,
dresses like the demi-anode, is bold in the presence
of our sex, and is so m-travagant that a man of
good innse and limited means is compelled in self-
defonce to decline matrimony and find his solace
at a club. An article in the current number of
the lieriew hasps once mare upon this theme.
Time was, says, he writer, when the stereotyped
phrase, " a fair young English girl,"
meant the ideal of womanhood, when
we thought we had in her "the pick of
4‘ creation," when she was content to be what
Goo sad Nature had made her. That was in the
rid time, but now the patters is changed, and the
" girl of the period" is said to have a vitiated
taste, is sacrifice decency or cleanliness, to wear
false hair and to paint her shin, and in short to
assimilate as nearly as possible " to a class of
" women whom we must not cell by their proper
"or improper name." A tenable charge this.
Heaven help us if it be true. But we should
like to ask trim, " the simple and genuine girl of
" the past, with her tender little ways, and
" pretty bashful modesties," is supposed
to have flourished is our land. Was it
in some far-distant age celebrated by ballad-
mongers or romance writers, or within a period of
history with which we are tolerably familiar ?
How far back does the writer go for this bright
picture ?—centuries or decades Not, we suppose,
to the period of the Restoration, when virtue was
deemed a weakness—when ladies of good breeding,
like Mrs. Parrs, found amusement in the cruelties
of the bear-garden, and laughed with masks on at
indecent plays. Or does he seek for his ideal
girl in the reigns of Wit.tiam and of ANNE, when
ladies were certainly not content to be what
GOD had made them, but used powders
and paint, wore patches and hoops, when almost
all women were ignorant, and many were openly
licentious Or shall we come down to the reigns of
the Gamma and seek for "the fair English girl of
" the peat " in the century which those famous
specimens of royalty have made illustrious or
notorious ? Even then a young lady was scarcely,
to quote a phrase of the reviewer's, " the reel
" thing." In those days modest young women
were not ashamed to read Mrs. Barnes novels ;
Piton's poems were to be found on their
dressing tables, they frequented Ranelagh, they
amused themselves with lotteries, and assuredly
they were even less like what GOD and nature
had made them than during the recent rage for
crinolines, and for those hideous °awesome*.

called chignons. Never, probably, was the
fashion of female dress more artificial than in
the middle of last century, when the ladies built
up their hair into a lofty tower, until the bead
with its adjuncts " came," as Lord Mason ob-
serves, "to be almost a fourth Cl the whole
figure .1)

The truth is that, as in put was so also in ow
own, folly and pretension are more weapiesoes
than modesty and merit. It is may to 11. maul

Eccerrisacinm of character meet us in every
country and at all periods. One of the strangest
illustrations of morbid fancy we have of late en-
countered is recorded in our Paris contemporaries
of yesterday. It appears that on Monday
last there died in that city a Mr. V.,
who was an extensive property owner in
the quarter of the Madeleine. Mr. V.
was born in 1777 in the neighbourhood of Melon,
and on the day of his birth an oak vas plaited
in the garden of his father's house, which bad
grown up • very beautiful true. Last
year Mr. V., who had attained his
90th year, imagined that his hour was
come, and he made a will, in which
he enjoined upon his heirs that they should bury
him at the foot of the coteval oak. He did not
die. however, as soon se he expected, and fearing
lest the public authorities would not allow his
body to be buried as he desired, in his
will, he ordered the tree to be cut down.
He had made from it a splendidly ornamented
coffin, which he kept in his bed-room. It was
furnished with a mattress, fine sheets, and pillows.
For some months pest be was accustomed to speed
tke night in tisis "living tomb," and at
last was found dead there on Monday morning.
Ms. V. carried his taste for the lugubrious even
beyond his coffin. The room in which
he used to labour was full of skeletons,
skulls, (newel inscriptions, pictures representing
carpels, cemeteries, hangings, murders carnage,
the Deluge, and a variety of similar aososa.
He was, moreover, the solitary occupant of this
room, for no member of the family had the courage
ever to enter it. The Emperor Crum.= V.,
fa the nionastery et SI. Just, was in the
Wit of eontemphiim the ccEin in wild'
his body was to mese after his
and them are areaseees other liwereces
particularly in the "Urea of the Saints," bee ~