The Miscellaneous Works Author:Oliver Goldsmith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: No. II—SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1759. ON DEESS: Showing, that they are generally most ridiculous thcmselws, who are apt to tee most ridicule in others Fore... more »igners observe, that there are no ladies in the world more beautiful, or more ill-dressed than those of England. Our countrywomen have been compared to those pictures, where the face is the work of Raphael; but the draperies thrown out by some empty pretender, destitute of taste, and entirely unacquainted with design. If I were a poet, I might observe, on this occasion, that so much beauty set off with all the advantages of dress would be too powerful an antagonist for the opposite sex, and therefore it was wisely ordered, that our ladies should want taste, lest their admirers should entirely want reason. But to confess a truth, I do not find they have a greater aversion to fine clothes than the women of any other country whatsoever. I cannot fancy that a shopkeeper's wife in Cheapside has a greater tenderness for the fortune of her husband than a citi sen's wife in Paris; or that miss in a boarding-school is more an economist in dress than mademoiselle in a nunnery. Although Paris may be accounted the soil in which almost every fashion takes its rise, its influence is never so general there u with us. They study there the happy method of uniting grace and fashion, and never excuse a woman for being awkwardly dressed, by saying her clothes are made in the mode. A French woman is a perfect architect in dress; she never, with G-othio This formed No. XV. of the volume of" Esaayu" published in 1765. ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a squabby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion, only when it happens not to be repugnant to private bea...« less