I
have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain
their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that
an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate
the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English
lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so
far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people class
under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not
pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive
with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully
against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and
sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits
down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she
looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by
the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably
credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can
fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, not always
positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth
and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much
well-founded self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils,
troubles, and dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a
foe.
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