“I know this age has so great a contempt of the former that ’tis but matter of scorn to alledge any of their customs; else I should say that the liberties that are taken now would then have been startled at. They that should then have seen a young maid rambling abroad without her mother or some other prudent person, would have looked on her as a stray, and thought it but a neighbourly office to have brought her home: whereas now ’tis a rarity to see them in any company graver than themselves, and she that goes with her parent (unless it be such a parent as is as wild as herself) thinks she does but walk abroad with jaylour.” Our national fault--want of taste in dress, and fondness for new fashions, however unsuitable--called forth the censure of an Italian visitor:-- “The ladies of England do not understand the art of decorating their persons so well as those of Italy; they generally increase the volume of the head by a cap which makes it much bigger than nature, a fault which should be always avoided in adorning that part.... They wear their petticoats too short behind, and not imitating the most graceful birds, as the ladies of Italy and France, in a trail of their robes upon the ground, lose the greatest grace which dress can impart to a female.... “In truth, not beauty, but novelty governs in London, not taste, but copy. A celebrated woman of five foot six inches gives law to the dress of those who are but four feet two.... There is nothing so common as to hear the ladies of this nation assure you that such a shape is quite out of fashion, and the present reigning mode is the slender or the large; as if the creative power, like the hands of mantua makers, had cut the human person by a new pattern and thrown away the old.... This is not the case in Italy and France; the ladies know that the grace which attends plumpness is unbecoming the slender; and the tall lady never affects to look like a fairy; nor the dwarf like the giantess, but each studying the air and mein which become her figure, appears in the most engaging dress that can be made, to set off her person to the greatest advantage.” About the middle of the century quite an outcry arose about the introduction of so many French fashions, and the prints of the day are full of caricatures of French ways and costumes. It was the upper classes who were first seized with this mania for imitation, and the example being infectious, spread rapidly through all ranks of society. The fashionable world followed France, and the middle classes followed the fashionable world. The mode of life, the popularity of public gardens, to which high and low resorted, brought the ways of the gay world under the eyes of the staid folk who dwelt in the city.