The Abbe Robin was a chaplain in Rochambeau’s army during the Revolution, and wrote thus in regard to the American ladies in his “Nouveau Voyage dans l’Amerique Septentrionale,” published in 1782:—­

“They are tall and well-proportioned; their features are generally regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color....  At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of youth.  At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit.  The men are almost as premature.”

Again:  The Chevalier Louis Felix de Beaujour lived in the United States from 1804 to 1814, as consul-general and charge d’affaires; and wrote a book, immediately after, which was translated into English under the title, “A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present Century.”  In this he thus describes American women:—­

“The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their physiognomy.  Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are possessed of a light and airy shape,—­the breast high, a fine head, and their color of a dazzling whiteness.  Let us imagine, under this brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air, accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this beauty fades and passes in a moment.  At the age of twenty-five their form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have disappeared.”

These statements bring out a class of facts, which, as it seems to me, are singularly ignored by some of our physiologists.  They indicate that the modification of the American type began early, and was, as a rule, due to causes antedating the fashions or studies of the present day.  Here are our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they were actually seen by the eyes of impartial or even flattering critics.  These critics were not Englishmen, accustomed to a robust and ruddy type of women, but Frenchmen, used to a type more like the American.  They were not mere hasty travellers; for the one lived here ten years, and the other was stationed for some time at Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted in those days for the beauty of its women.  Yet we find it their verdict upon these grandmothers of nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed the same delicate beauty, the same slenderness, the same pallor, the same fragility, the same early decline, with which their granddaughters are now reproached.

In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were better:  but an examination of their portraits will satisfy any one that they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of another French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798, that “if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people.”  And he goes on to give particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect to cookery and diet than now prevails in any decent American society.