AN ENGLISH GENLTMAN says—“Inasmuch as the ladies of my family subscribe to the ENGLISH WOMAN’S DOMESTIC MAGAZINE, I sometime take it off the table and glance through its contents. Thus it has arisen that I have read, and been much amused with, the correspondence in its column on the subject of Tight-Lacing. May I be allowed to say a very few words upon this subject myself? Imprimis, then, I believe that this supreme folly is perpetrated by woman solely for the admiration of one another. I never yet met with a man who admired a small waist. Personally, I cannot conceive that to be an elegant figure which approximates to that of the wasp, an insect I could never yet bring myself to think handsome. Moreover, to reproduce an off-reiterated argument, the Venus de Medici is universally admitted to be the standard model of a perfect female figure; and this is as far removed from the hourglass shape admired by some few silly women as it is possible to imagine. In the next place, this idiotic mania for cutting themselves in half is almost entirely a middle-class weakness, rarely extending beyond the daughters of professional men, if even so high. Ladies (and by ladies I mean women of birth and position who are actually in society) have for a long time, I am most thankful to say, risen superior to an act of silliness which did, I fear, in years gone by, originate with a very few of them. If you want to see tight stays now-a-days you must seek for them, not in the best English houses, but in the back-parlous behind shops, in ‘genteel‘ boarding-schools, or behind the bars of railway refreshment-rooms. The ‘maids’ of whom some of your fair correspondents speak as employed to lace them up tightly, are, I firmly believe, ‘maids-of-all-work.’ If the person signing himself A YOUNG BARONET, who wrote to you some time since, be really what his signature indicates, he will, I am sure, corroborate me in the assertion that he does not know one girl in a hundred in his own rank of life possessing such as he professes to admire, and that he must go out of his own set entirely to find it. If, then, any one fancies that she will produce a ‘fashionable’ figure by constricting all her vital organs, let me earnestly measure her that she will not. She may screw up a waist which some one equally empty-headed may be able to span, but any man who may see it will only quietly laugh at her. It is a hopeful sign that, in the upper classes, people are becoming more and more natural every day. It is, of course, impossible to predict whether women of rank and station will ever return to the folly of compressing themselves. At all events, at present they are practically free from it.”