In reference to this sentiment, her manners must bear due affinity with her figure, and her deportment with her rank. The youthful and delicate-shaped girl is allowed a gaiety of air which would ill become a women of maturer years and larger proportions; but at all times of life, when the figure is slender, a swan-like neck, and the motions are naturally swaying, for that girl, or that woman, to affect what is called a majestic air, would be as unavailing as absurd. It is not in the power of a figure so constructed ever to look majestic. By stiffening her joints, walking with an erect mien, and drawing up her neck, she would certainly be upright; she would seem to have had a determined dancing-master, who, in spite of nature and grace, had made her _hold up her head_; but she would never look like anything but a stiff, inelegant creature. The character of these slight forms corresponds with their resemblances in the vegetable world: the aspen, the willow, bend their gentle heads at every passing breeze, and their flexible and tender arms toss in the wind with grace and beauty: such is the woman of delicate proportions. She must enter a room either with the buoyant step of a young nymph, if youth is her passport to sportiveness; or, if she is advanced nearer the meridian of life, she then may glide in, with that ease of manner which gives play to all the graceful motions of her elegantly undulating form. For her to crane up her neck, would be to change its fine swan-like bend into the scraggy throat of the ostrich: all her movements should be of a flexible character. Her mode of salutation should be rather a bow than a courtesy; and when she sits, she should model her easy attitude rather by the ideas of the painter, when he would pourtray a reclining nymph, than according to the lessons of the grace-destroying governess, who would marshal her pupils on their chairs like a rank of drilled recruits. In short, for a slender or thin woman, to be stiff at any time, is, in the first case, to render of no effect the advantages of nature; and, in the next, to increase and aggravate her defects, by making it more conspicuous by a constrained and ridiculous carriage. Though we cannot unite the majestic air which declares command with this easy, nymph-like deportment, the dignity of modesty may be its inseparable companion. The timid, the retreating step; the downcast eye; the varying complexion, “blushing at the deep regard she draws!” all these belong to this class of females; and they are charms so truly feminine, so exquisitely lovely, that I cannot but place them with their counterpart, the ethereal form, as the perfection of female beauty.