Note 18 — JOURNAL

It may be of interest to quote the remarks of the author of The Diary of an Invalid (Henry Mathews), in 1819: 'The French women must, I think, yield the palm to their English and Italian neighbours.... It is a curious fact that in 1814, the English ladies were so possessed with a rage for imitating even the deficiencies of their French sisterhood, that they actually had recourse to violent means, even to the injury of their health, to compress their beautiful bosoms as flatly as possible, and destroy every vestige of those charms for which, of all other women, they are perhaps the most indebted to nature.' Paris, May 28, 1819.—Editor.