The weekly pioneer and Democrat. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn. Territory) 1855-1865, 1862-11-14
English Women.
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

| have heard good deal of the tenacity
with which the English ladies retain their
beauty to an advanced period of their life !;
needs use and cultivation before it can
quite appreciate the charm of English
beauty at any age) it strikes me that an
English lady Of fifty is apt to become
creature less refined and delicate, so far as
her physique goes, than anything that we
Western people class under the name of
woman. She has an awful ponderosity of
frame, not pulpy, like the looser develop,
ment of our fat women, but massive with
solid beef and streaky tallow; that Though
struggling manfully against the idea) you
inevitably think other as made up of steaks
and sirloins. When she walks her advance
is elephantine. When she sits down it is on
great round space of her Makers foot
stool, where she looks as if nothing would
move her. She imposes awe and respect
by the muchness of her personality, to- such
a degree that you probably credit her
greater moral and intellectual force than
she can fully claim. Her usage is
usually grim and stern, not always posi-
lively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not
merely by its breadth and weight of
feature, but because it seems to express
SO much well founded self-reliance, such
acquaintance with the world, it's tolls, it's
troubles and dangers, and such sturdy ca
pacity for trampling down foe. Without
anything positively salient, or actually of
fensive, or indeed unjustly formidable to
her neighbors, she has the effect of sew
enty-four gun-ship in time of peace; while
you assure yourself that there is no real
danger, you cannot help thinking how fu-
tile the effort to infiict any counter injury.
She certainly looks tenfold, nay, hun
dred fold better able to take care of her
self than our slender-framed and haggard
wOmankind but | have not found reason
to" suppose that the English dowager of
strength of character than our women of
similar age, or even a tougher physical en-
durance than they. Morally, she is strong,
| suspect, only in society, and in the COM
mon routine of social affairs, and would be
found powerless and timid in any excep-
tional strait that might call for energy out
side of the conventiOnalities amid which
she has grown up.
You can meet this figure in the street,
and live, and even smile at the recollec-
ton. But conceive of her in the ball
room, with the bare brawny arms that she
invariably displays there, and all the other
corresponding development, such as is
beautiful in the maiden blossom, but
spectacle to howl at in such an over-blown
cabbage-rOse as this.
Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk
there must be hidden the modest, slender,
violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass
of earthiness has nnkindly overgrown for
an English maiden in her teens, though
very seldom so pretty as our own damsels,
possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm
of half blossom, and delicately folded
leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by
maidenly reserves, with which, somehow
or other, our American girls often fail to
adorn themselves during an appreciate
moment. 1t is a pity that the Eng
fish violet should grow into such an
outrageously deveveloped peony as
l have attempted to describe. l
wonder whether a middle-aged husband
ought to be considered as legally married
to all these accretions that have overgrown
the slenderness Of his bride, since he led
her to the altar, and which make her so
much more than he ever bargained for! Is
it not sounder view of the case, that the
matrimonial bond cannot be held to in
clude the three-fourths of the wife that had
no existence when the ceremony was per-
formed? And as to the matter of con-
science and good morals, ought not an
English married pair to insist upon the
celebration of silver wedding at the end
of twenty-five years, in order to legalize
and mutually appropriate that corporal
growth, of which both parties have indi-
vidually come into possession since they
were pronounced one flesh
GREATEXCITEM DAYTON.