Cosmetics are not going to be a mere prosaic remedy
for age or plainness, but all ladies and all young girls will come to
love them. Does not a certain blithe Marquise, whose lettres intimes
from the Court of Louis Seize are less read than their wit deserves,
tell us how she was scandalised to see `me^me les toutes jeunes
demoiselles e'maille'es comme ma tabatie`re'? So it shall be with us.
Surely the common prejudice against painting the lily can but be based
on mere ground of economy. That which is already fair is complete, it
may be urged--urged implausibly, for there are not so many lovely
things in this world that we can afford not to know each one of them
by heart. There is only one white lily, and who that has ever seen--as
I have--a lily really well painted could grudge the artist so fair a
ground for his skill? Scarcely do you believe through how many nice
metamorphoses a lily may be passed by him. In like manner, we all know
the young girl, with her simpleness, her goodness, her wayward
ignorance. And a very charming ideal for England must she have been,
and a very natural one, when a young girl sat even on the throne. But
no nation can keep its ideal for ever, and it needed none of Mr.
Gilbert's delicate satire in `Utopia' to remind us that she had passed
out of our ken with the rest of the early Victorian era.
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