Beauty in spectacles is like Cupid in knee breeches, or the Graces with
pocket handkerchiefs--an excrescence of refinement; an innovation of the
ideas which spiritualize woman into a goddess; a philosophical blossom
of the “march of mind.” Beauty in spectacles! and has it come to this?
Burke said that the age of chivalry was past, and publishers say that
the age of poetry has followed it; powder and periwigs destroyed the
one, and spectacles have gone far to annihilate the other. Think of the
queen of beauty of some tournament--thanks to my Lord Eglintoun for
making such words familiar to us--looking on the encountering knights
through a patent pair of spectacles!--picture to yourself a beautiful
and romantic young lady parting from her lover, taking the “first long
lingering kiss of love,” as pretty Miss Pardoe terms it, and just imagine
the figure the spectacles would cut in such an encounter; think of Mary
Queen of Scots, Lady Jane Grey, Scott’s “Jewess,” or Shakspeare’s “Lady
Macbeth,” with such appendages! I think of a heroine in a novel taking
off her spectacles to shed “salt tears” for her lover’s absence, or in
the emotion of a distressing juncture throwing herself at the feet of
some obdurate tyrant, breaking the lenses of her “sight preservers;”
think of all this, and judge of the effect which spectacles, as an
ornament, have upon romance. Beauty has three stages--the coy, the
dignified, and the intellectual. The first exists until about twenty,
the second until twenty-five, and the last until beauty has made unto
itself wings and flown away. It is in this last stage that women wear
spectacles. The symptoms of spectacles begin at an early age. The young
Miss has a primness, a staidness, and a miniature severity of aspect, at
variance from her years. They never seem young; there is no freshness
of heart in them: they become women faster than other girls, and become
old faster than other women; they are remarkable for thin lips, sharp
noses, and white artificial teeth. They are walking strictures upon
human life--bleak visions of philosophy in petticoats--daughters, not it
would seem of love, but of Fellows of the Royal Society! They are fond
of phrenology and meetings of scientific associations. They like a good
pew in church, and write long letters to their unfortunate “friends in
the country.” They are generally spinsters, or, if married, motherless.
No young wife with “six small children” ever wore spectacles. They go a
good deal into company, where they are seen seated on sofas talking to
ladies older than themselves, or turning over the leaves of a book, and
with interesting abstraction poring over it. They dance quadrilles, but
never waltz. Heaven and earth! think of a pair of spectacles whirling
in a waltz. They have a genius for the “scholastic profession,” and
frequently exercise it as amateurs “never eat suppers;” and are, many of
them, members of the Horticultural Society. The lady with the spectacles!
Half a century ago this would have been understood to refer to some
one stricken in years, but now-a-days infirmity of eye-sight has been
raised to the rank of a charm. The moment spectacles become really
useful they are abandoned; it is the harmonious combination of youth and
short-sightedness which gives beauty to the guise. Intense interest is
expected to be felt towards her, who, still young and lovely, abandons
the frivolities of her sex for the calm secluded pleasures of intellect.
This is the point our heroines aim at. But we have done with them. They
may be very good in their way, but their ways are not as our ways.
Flirts, coquettes, prudes, and a host of other orders into which the
sex are classified, have their failings, but they, at least, are women;
while the “lady with the spectacles” seems hardly a daughter of Eve,
but a mysterious being; a new creation, come into the world to gladden
the lovers of modern science, and patronise the house of Solomons and
Co.--_Court Gazette._
* * * * *
MARRIAGE.--It is the happiest and most virtuous state of society, in
which the husband and wife set out early together, make their property
together, and with perfect sympathy of soul graduate all their expenses,
plans, calculations and desires, with reference to their present
means, and to their future and common interest. Nothing delights me
more than to enter the neat little tenement of the young couple, who
within perhaps two or three years, without any resources but their own
knowledge or industry, have joined heart and hand, and engage to share
together the responsibilities, duties, interests, trials, and pleasures
of life. The industrious wife is cheerfully employing her own hands in
domestic duties, putting her house in order, or mending her husband’s
clothes, or preparing the dinner, whilst, perhaps, the little darling
sits prattling upon the floor, or lies sleeping in the cradle--and
everything seems preparing to welcome the happiest of husbands and the
best of fathers, when he shall come from his toil to enjoy the sweets
of his little paradise. This is the true domestic pleasure, the “only
bliss that survived the fall.” Health, contentment, love, abundance,
and bright prospects, are all here. But it has become a prevalent
sentiment, that a man must acquire his fortune before he marries--that
the wife must have no sympathy, nor share with him in the pursuit of
it, in which most of the pleasure truly consists; and the young married
people must set out with as large and expensive an establishment as is
becoming those who have been wedded for 20 years. This is very unhappy.
It fills the community with bachelors, who are waiting to make their
fortunes, endangering virtue and promoting vice--it destroys the true
economy and design of the domestic institution, and it promotes idleness
and inefficiency among females, who are expecting to be taken up by a
fortune, and passively sustained, without any care or concern on their
part--and thus many a wife becomes, as a gentleman once remarked, not a
“help-mate,” but a “help-eat.”--_Winslow._
* * * * *
Printed and published every Saturday by GUNN and CAMERON, at
the Office of the General Advertiser. No. 6, Church Lane,
College Green, Dublin.--Agents:--R. GROOMBRIDGE, Panyer Alley,
Paternoster Row, London; SIMMS and DINHAM, Exchange Street,
Manchester; C. DAVIES, North John Street, Liverpool; SLOCOMBE and
SIMMS, Leeds; J. MENZIES, Prince’s Street, Edinburgh; and DAVID
ROBERTSON, Trongate, Glasgow.