In Sparta the girls used to take part in military sports just like the boys, not that they might go to war, but that they might bear sons who could endure hardship.  That is not what I desire.  To provide the state with soldiers it is not necessary that the mother should carry a musket and master the Prussian drill.  Yet, on the whole, I think the Greeks were very wise in this matter of physical training.  Young girls frequently appeared in public, not with the boys, but in groups apart.  There was scarcely a festival, a sacrifice, or a procession without its bands of maidens, the daughters of the chief citizens.  Crowned with flowers, chanting hymns, forming the chorus of the dance, bearing baskets, vases, offerings, they presented a charming spectacle to the depraved senses of the Greeks, a spectacle well fitted to efface the evil effects of their unseemly gymnastics.  Whatever this custom may have done for the Greek men, it was well fitted to develop in the Greek women a sound constitution by means of pleasant, moderate, and healthy exercise; while the desire to please would develop a keen and cultivated taste without risk to character.

When the Greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family.  This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason.  These women gave birth to the healthiest, strongest, and best proportioned men who ever lived, and except in certain islands of ill repute, no women in the whole world, not even the Roman matrons, were ever at once so wise and so charming, so beautiful and so virtuous, as the women of ancient Greece.

It is admitted that their flowing garments, which did not cramp the figure, preserved in men and women alike the fine proportions which are seen in their statues.  These are still the models of art, although nature is so disfigured that they are no longer to be found among us.  The Gothic trammels, the innumerable bands which confine our limbs as in a press, were quite unknown.  The Greek women were wholly unacquainted with those frames of whalebone in which our women distort rather than display their figures.  It seems to me that this abuse, which is carried to an incredible degree of folly in England, must sooner or later lead to the production of a degenerate race.  Moreover, I maintain that the charm which these corsets are supposed to produce is in the worst possible taste; it is not a pleasant thing to see a woman cut in two like a wasp—­it offends both the eye and the imagination.  A slender waist has its limits, like everything else, in proportion and suitability, and beyond these limits it becomes a defect.  This defect would be a glaring one in the nude; why should it be beautiful under the costume?

I will not venture upon the reasons which induce women to incase themselves in these coats of mail.  A clumsy figure, a large waist, are no doubt very ugly at twenty, but at thirty they cease to offend the eye, and as we are bound to be what nature has made us at any given age, and as there is no deceiving the eye of man, such defects are less offensive at any age than the foolish affectations of a young thing of forty.