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to pay the visit I have mentioned. It happened || conducted Acasto, seing the violence of the by one of those unfortunate accidents, which gentlemen, had fled to the house, and spread almost confirm us in the belief of fate, and a cer- the alarm. The sister of Acasto, hearing that tain and necessary destiny, that Belise was ac- the stranger, for the lad knew not Lysander by tually on her way to visit the sister of her lover. any other name, had presented a pistol at her Belise was not ignorant of her husband's jea-brother, hurried to the place in great terror, follousy, and her friends had often remonstrated lowed by Belise, who was yet ignorant of the with her, and amongst them myself, against an dreadful event. They arrived the moment intimacy with Acasto's sister in the present com- Lysander fell; and Belise in that moment recog. plexion of affairs. But her unhappy foible, the || nised her husband, and sprang forward instincpride of innocence, made her disdain all appear-tively. Belise, too confounded as yet to comance of concession, and rather increased the fre- prehend the extent of her misfortune, attempted quency of her visits to this lady. She defied all to raise him up, but found that he was dead! censure, from an assurance of its groundlessness; She gave a shriek of madness and horror, and and being supported by a conscious innocence, fell senseless beside him! would stoop to no submission. She was now, therefore, in the very house of Acasto, and her carriage remaining at the door.

Lysander, who had pushed his horse to its full, goaded on by jealousy and revenge, arrived at the avenue leading to the house the moment Belise, in her carriage, stopped at the gate. He saw Acasto come to the door, take her hand, and conduct her within. This was enough. He perceived a lad at a distance, whom he beckoned to him, and dispatched with a message to Acasto. It was "That a strange gentleman desired to see him on business of importance."

Endeavour now to present to your mind the horrid scene! The sister of Acasto stanching the blood which flowed from her brother's wound-Lysander dead, and his wife, to all appearance so, beside him-the pistols lying in the road, and a whole parish, for the people were fast collecting, surrounding the spot!

I will here conclude my history. I will only add, that Belise remained for some years in a state of perfect insensibility, almost approaching to idiotism. Her senses, however, were at length providentially restored; but as they brought her to the full perception of her misfortune, I have sometimes thought the loss of them would have been more tolerable. She still retains her grief, and will often wholly seclude herself from society, and spend the day in tears. Acasto likewise felt sensibly his misfortune in having murdered his friend by his own hand; and, to dissipate his grief, and give time for the story to die away, he fled to the Continent. He is now a sincere penitent, and has lately returned; but his former gay spirits are lost, and he sometimes experiences the distraction of a mind

Acasto, surprised at this singular message, came, directed by the boy, to the entrance of the avenue. Lysander, in the fury of his passion, immediately collared him, and presenting a pistol in one hand, held in the other the fatal billet. He then retreated a few paces, and levelling his pistol, fired it, desiring Acasto to do the same. The shot wounded his rival, who, irritated by pain, discharged his own pistol. The ball entered the heart of Lysander, who fell dead upon the spot! In the meantime, the affrighted lad who had wholly possessed by melancholy.

THE LADIES' TOILETTE; OR, ENCYCLOPÆDIA OF BEAUTY.
[Continued from Page 15.]

CHAP. IX,
Of Fashion.

THE celebrated Dr. Young has admirably depicted the divinity to whom all ages and all ranks render servile homage, who even finds means to bow the neck of wisdom to the yoke of folly, by the threat of ridicule; that divinity whose power has never been disputed by infidels, whose worship is every where established, who reckons temples in every region of the globe, but whose metropolis is chiefly at Paris and London.

It is truly astonishing that this prodigious power of opinion, which successively proscribes whatever it once approved, should oblige us to bend the knee before the idol which it will so soon overthrow; should cause us to-day to think that form graceful which yesterday appeared ri diculous.

Women are perhaps too lightly accused of inconstancy; we impute to them as a crime a

taste with which we have perhaps inspired them; this inconstancy which, it is true, they carry to excess, with respect to objects of ornament or dress, reflects more severely perhaps on our levity than on theirs. They are afraid to appear the same, because they are rather distrustful of our constancy; they renew themselves, as it were, every day, in order to furnish fresh reasons for our homage; they attempt to fix us by our inconstancy itself, and are well aware that they must proceed by leaps and bounds, to keep pace with the heart of man.

I cannot venture to affirm that this motive is the only cause of the instability of the fashions, many other causes are sometimes combined with it, and are less flattering for our sex; but let us preserve at least, if possible, the happy illusion, which frequently forms the most genuine portion of our pleasures.

For my part I am fully convinced that when the men become less frivolous, the women will be less inconstant. The object of women is to please, and their nice discernment gives them a perfect knowledge of what is calculated to afford us pleasure. The means they employ are therefore deduced from our particular inclinations, as the bait which conceals the perfidious hook is always adapted to the taste of the fish which is intended to be caught., If women make mistakes, it is not in the theory, but sometimes, as we shall presently see, in the execution; they draw false conclusions from a true principle.

Some authors have sung the praises of fashion, considering it in an economical and political view; they have beheld in it an interesting and productive branch of commerce, a real gold mine, advantageous to all the states that can work it with skill, an increase of luxury necessary for the general circulation-but these writers are mistaken.

Much, both of good and bad, has been advanced concerning luxury, and were we to colJect all that has been said of it by its partizans and its enemies, we should find that the arguments in its favour are perhaps inferior in strength to those that have been produced against it; but we have already treated of the luxury of the sex, and therefore it is not in that point of view that we shall now consider fashion.

In our enquiry concerning fashion, we shall examine only the tyrannic 1 power which it exercises over us, and which, as I have already observed, fascinates our eyes to such a degree as to cause us to discover charms in objects which we had condemned, and to make us despise what once appeared enchanting-a foible of a most extraordinary nature, and which has at all times been an object of censure.

It is universally admitted, that no nation are

such abject slaves to this tyrant as the French. This brings to my recollection a very curious caricature. A painter had represented the different nations of the world in the costume of their respective countries; but the Frenchman was naked, and had a bundle under his arm; underneath the painter had written these words, "As this man changes his fashion every moment, we have given him the stuff, that he may get it made up in any fashion he pleases."

The artist probably borrowed this idea from an Italian book, printed a great many years ago, in which is related the following anecdote :-A fool walked stark naked through the streets carrying a piece of cloth under his arm; being asked why he went without clothes, as he had materials for making them, he replied, "I am waiting to see when the fashions will stop, because I will not have the cloth made up into a dress which in a short time I should not be able to wear, on account of some new fashion."

This love of change is of very ancient date in the neighbouring kingdom of France; Montaigne reproaches his countrymen with it, and it is of the French that he says, "I complain of their particular indiscretion, in suffering themselves to be so exceedingly duped and blinded by the authority of present usage, as to be capable of changing their opinion and ideas every month, if it should so please custom, and of judging so differently of themselves; when they wore the busk of their doublets at the breast, they produced forcible reasons for maintaining that it was in its proper place; a few years afterwards, when it was removed down to between the thighs, they ridiculed the former fashion, as absurd and not to be endured. The present mode of dress cause them immediately to condemn the former, with such unanimity that you would say, it must be some kind of madness which thus deranges their understandings; because our changes are so sudden and so rapid in this respect, that the invention of all the tailors in the world would not be able to furnish novelties enough."

What would Montaigne say were he to come to life again, and to see to what a pitch this ridiculous love of novelties, this general propensity for change, has arrived, were he to behold his countrywomen engaged in varying without any other motive than that of variation; dressing today in a different manner from what they did yesterday, not to appear better, but merely for the pleasure of appearing otherwise; abandoning a handsome costume, not to make way for one still more handsome, but to adopt one which nobody ever saw before!

But Fashion has extended her empire in France in a very different manner. Not content with dictating laws to the Graces, with prescribing the

fashion of our clothes, the colour of the stuff, or the number of the folds that should be made in the bosom of a coxcomb's shirt; she has likewise subjected the arts, sciences, language, nay even diseases, and the art of curing them, to her invisible power. It would be a mark of extreme vulgarity to make use of a medicine which is out of fashion; and those who have had the misfortune to commit such an error, may, indeed, congratulate themselves on their cure, but they must not boast of it.

the fashion of the day is always the only one admitted by good taste; in the Medical Journal, the system of the day is the only one avowed by science; and yet each day sadly witnesses the lie given to the oracle of the preceding; each day our fair milliners seduce us with new fashions, and each day our grave doctors terrify us with new processes. I beg pardon, gentlemen, but I was thinking of forty-eight glasses of water! forty-eight!*

I could multiply the features of resemblance which cannot subsist between the Medical Journal and La Belle Assemblée, but I should be accused of attempting to make an injurious com

and the Fates that hold the thread of our lives. I shall, therefore, be silent while the reader listens to the testimony of a physician-an authority, which, on such a subject, is not liable to suspicion.

"The sciences (says he), which, it would be supposed, from the grandeur and dignity of their character, ought never to bend to the yoke of fashion, are nevertheless unable at all times to preserve themselves from its influence. Medicine itself pays her tribute; not satisfied with enthusiastically extolling many new remedies, most of which are destitute of virtues, while the rest are rather prejudicial than profitable; not content with giving celebrity to doctors, whose history would furnish an excellent paragraph for the chapter of usurped reputations, it is likewise necessary that her influence should extend even to the most scientific combinations of physiology. Thus organic diseases have become fashionable; they are now to be met with wherever you go. Those of the heart are most in vogue, especially among the fair sex; and though they are all reputed mortal, by medical men, yet well authenticated instances of them have been seen to end very happily in a natural accouchement."

It would be extremely curious to compare the annals of medicine for the last two hundred years. No journal, perhaps, bears so perfect a resemblance to the Journal of Fashions and Modes.parison between the Graces who handle gauze In the latter, we see caps and dresses successively replaced with fresh caps and dresses; in the Medical Journal, we find systems and processes replaced by other systems and other methods of cure. Thus we have seen hot baths in fashion, and then cold baths, which, in their turn, have been prescribed, and made way for the return of hot baths. We have seen bleeding become the universal remedy, and soon afterwards it was unanimously agreed that it killed a great number of patients. Water was, for a length of time, a cure for all diseases; and a celebrated Doctor now tells us, that wine has cured patients, who would certainly have died, had the physicians come in time to prescribe medicines for them-a fine confession truly in the mouth of a physician! || During a long, and, indeed, too long a period, purgatives were administered; fashion then caused emetics to be substituted in their stead. The transfusion of the blood, emetic wine, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, inoculation, bark, and Indian chesnuts, phosphorus, ice, gelatine, vaccination, &c. &c. have alternately been praised to the skies, as all-healing remedies. To-morrow will give birth to some new process, just in the same manner as La Belle Assemblée will furnish us with new hats and new dresses. In both the one and the other of these journals you see the system of the day universally extolled, and presently as universally decried. In the one you see the handsomest fashion last the shortest time, precisely because it is handsome, because every one adopts, and because it is not genteel to be like every body else; in the other, you see the simplest remedy soon decried, because it is within every one's reach; because all would adopt it, and it would derogate from the dignity and prosperity of the medical art. In La Belle Assemblée

The writer here alludes to a celebrated Bath

physician, who recently prescribed forty-eight glasses of water a day as a cure for the gout, if I recollect right.

(To be continued.)

SABINA;
OR,

MORNING SCENES IN THE DRESSING-ROOM OF A ROMAN LADY. [Continued from Page 19]

SCENE IV.-Cruelties towards Slaves; Carmion pares the nails; anxiety to have handsome hands and nails; Latris lets fall the case of the Mirror.

WHILE this was passing, Donna Sabina had not been idle, or, to speak more correctly, she had found means to keep half a dozen of slaves in full employment about her person. We left her under the hands of her skillful hair-dresser. Nape had fortunately tied the bow in front, and completed the structure of a head-dress, which the rigid Tertullian so justly denominates enormous protuberances of hair pinned up and plaited together. And during all these preparations and decorations, there had as yet, a circumstance considered as a variety and almos: miraculous, been no pins thrust into the arms and bosom of the busy Calamis, nor had the scourge been applied to the back or shoulders of the wretched Psecas or Latris.

traces of nocturual orgies and debaucheries !—
Her attendant damsels might then be as atten-
tive as they would, they might possess the dex-
terity of the Graces and of the Hours, still they
were sure to pay, with blood and tears, for the
ill humour of their guilty mistress.
It was,
therefore, prescribed by the regulations relative
to the custom of these much to be pitied ser-
vants, that while they were engaged in the dress-
ing-room, and at the toilette of the Domina, they
should appear perfectly naked down to the
breasts, that they might be ready to receive any
chastisement she thought fit to inflict, even with
scourges of plaited wire, and to the ends of
which were fastened pieces of bone or balls of
metal. Whatever the Domina had in her hand,
in the first emotion of passion, was converted
into an instrument of punishment. The long
and sharp-pointed needles, described in the se-
cond scene, was particularly convenient imple-
ments of torture for the miserable slaves. No-

*

It should be observed, that a cruel and sanguinary humour was the ordinary disposition manifested by Roman ladies of distinction at the toilette. Accustomed, from their early years, to the murderous fights of gladiators, or of animals at the ampitheatres, and to the bloody flagella-thing was more common than for the Domina to tions* of their slaves at home, they revenged, in the morning, on their attendants, every disappointment, and every vexation experienced dur ing the preceding day or the past night. Woe to these unfortunate creatures if the love-letter was not delivered in due time, if an assignation in the Temple of Isis was disappointed; or if the mirror, alone a stranger to flattery, exhibited to the Donna, at the first look in the morning, a red nose, a fresh pimple on the chin, or other

pierce the hair-dresser with these in the arms and
breasts, if she had the misfortune, at that mo-
ment, to excite her displeasure. Hence the ad-
vice of the master, in the “Art of Love," to
females, not to behave with petulance and cru.
elty to slaves, while at the toilette, if their lover
happens to be present:-

But no spectators e'er allow to pry,
Till all is finish'd, which allures the eye.
Yet, I must own, it oft affords delight,
To have the fair one comb her hair in sight;
To view the flowing honours of her head,
Fall on her neck, and o'er her shoulders spread.

*That the most voluptuous effeminacy is capable of entering into horrid league with the

*Let it only be recollected, that in every numerous family, there were particular slaves whose sole occupation consisted in scourging their fellow-slaves. They were denominated Lorarii Instead of these, many Roman ladies (unless Juvenal has been guilty of exaggeration) em ployed, for these executions, the public flagella-most refined cruelty, has, in modern times, been tors, whom the Romans comprehended in the general term, carnifices, and whose business it was to inflict the cruel scourgings which pre-revolution, such as Lebas, Carrier, &c. as also ceded capital punishment, by way of torture, and paid them a regular annual salary for their trouble.

demonstrated by the many furies of the guil lotine and monsters of terrorism in the French

by that infernal novel, Justine, by the reading of which, as Retif de la Bretonne asserts, Danton used to excite his diabolical thirst of blood.

But let her look, that she with care avoid
All fretful humours while she's so employ'd;
Let her not still undo, with peevish haste,
All that her woman does, who does her best.
I hate a vixen, that her maid assails,

And scratches, with her bodkin or her nails,
While the poor girl in blood and tears must
mourn,

And her heart curses what her hands adorn.

the palace, as did formerly the despots of Sicily, If she has privately received a letter from her lover; if she has made an assignation to meet him in the garden of Cæsar, or in the shady grove of favouring Isis, the trembling Psecas enters, with dishevelled hair, and naked to the waist, to arrange the head-dress of her mistress. 'Ha! why is that lock too high? and the scourge instantly punishes the atrocious crime. And what fault has then Psecas committed? Can she help it if the mirror shews an ugly pimple on the nose of her rigid mistress? Yet Psecas must bleed for it. A second trembling slave takes her place, and curls and plaits the Domina's ringlets. Next to her stands an old woman, who was once expert at dressing hair, but is now removed to the distaff. She first gives her opinion, and after her the other slaves, who form an extensive circle, are heard according to their age and offices. A trial for life and death could not be

And in one of his love-elegies, in which he praises the beautiful hair of his Corinna, the poet expressly mentions, as a proof of his sensibility and tenderness, that the slave who dressed her hair, had never been thus barbarously treated on his account: "It was soft and pliable," says he, bending into a thousand forms. Never did it give thee pain while dressing; nor did the pin or the teeth of the comb ever pull it out. Your maid never suffered while she was dressing it, for this operation was often performed in my presence; yet never did the arm of your Cy-held with more solemnity than this consultation passis betray any marks of wounds from the hair-pins."

Sometimes the mirror itself, which first betrayed the neglect of the trembling hair-dresser, was thrown at the head of the culprit, Marshal describes a scene of this kind in the epigram addressed to Lalage, under which name he addresses one of these female furies at the toilette: "Of all her ringlets of her head-dress, ene only slipped from under the pin. Lalage throws the mirror which shews her this mischance, at her unfortunat,attendant. She tears her hair, till at length the unfortunate plecusa falls beneath redoubled blows at her feet. Cease, Lalage, to adorn your mischievous hair; let not the hand of a slave again touch your insensate head. Let the scorching salamander crawl over it, let the rasor despoil it, and let your head henceforward appear as smooth as the surface of your mirror."

It was, nevertheless, a favour which called for their gratitude when the slaves received this chastisement from the hand of the Domina. Far more cruel was the punishment, when, in her anger, she directed it to be inflicted on the wretched culprit by a female brought up to this employment, and kept for that particular purpose.

In this case, they were immediately seized, without mercy, and bound, by their twisted hair, to a door-post or a pillar, and lashed on their bare backs, with thongs cut from ox hides, or knotted cords, till the mistress pronounced the word "Enough!" or, "Go!"

A scene of this kind is delineated by the Roman satirist, Juvenal, with such energy and expression, as not to leave the slightest doubt of its truth. He says, of one of these ladies, "With tyrannic fury she storms and rages in No. XIV. Vol. II.

upon the head dress of the lady, which is mounted up, story after story, into a formidable

tower.

What a revolting scene! but we shall not think it improbable, if we recollect what modern travellers, and eye-witnesses, have related concerning the ladies of the north, who cause the most painful punishmeuts to be inflicted on their female attendants for the slightest offences; or how the unfeeling Creoles maltreat their negro slaves in the West Indies, almost without any occasion. From all that we already know of our Donna Sabina, she was capable of renewing such a scene at her toilette as often as the least cloud of ill-humour threw a gloom over her brow; and it was, perhaps, owing only to the dexterity and attention of Cypassis, and to the welcome visit of the flower-woman, Glyce rium, that the Donna was this day rather milder and better tempered than usual. And yet I am under some concern for poor Latris, whose office it is to hold the mirror. Though the hairdressers have withdrawn to give place to another class of attendants on the toilette, yet she is ot relieved from her troublesome employment.*

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