TEE ANDALUSIAN BEAUTIES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXIII, Issue 9092, 1 May 1890, Page 6

TEE ANDALUSIAN BEAUTIES.

As regards her stature and mould, the Andalusian girl is almost invariably a petite brunette, and although not all are plump, and many are too stout, the majority have exquisitely-symmetrical tapering limbs, well-developed busts, (flatchested women are almost unknown in Spain), and the most dainty and refined hands and feet. Regarding these feet Gautier makes the most astounding assertion that “ without any poetic exaggeration it would he easy here in Seville to find women whose feet an infant might hold in its bands. A French girl of seven or eight could not wear the shoes of an Andalusian of twenty.” I am glad to attest that, if the feet of Sevillian women really were so monstrously small fifty years ago, they are so no longer. It is discouraging to see a man like Gautier fall into the vulgar error of fancying that, because a small foot is a thing of beauty, therefore the smaller the foot the more beautiful it must be. Beauty of feet, hands, and waists is a matter of proportion, not of absolute size, and too small feet, hands, and waists are not beautiful, but ugly. We might as well argue that, since a man’s foot ought to be larger than a woman’s, therefore the larger his foot the more he has of manly beauty. If Andalusian women really had feet so small that a baby might hold them in its hands, they would not be able to walk at all, or, at least, not gracefully. But it is precisely their graceful gait and carriage for' which they are most famed and admired. All Spanish women are graceful as compared with the women of other nations, but among them all the Andalusians aro pre-eminent in the poetry of motion, and this is probably the reason that, although regular facial _ beauty is perhaps commoner in Madrid than in Seville, I found that you cannot pay a greater compliment to a girl in Northern Spain than by asking her if she is an Andalusian. It would be useless to seek among laud animals for a gait comparable to that oI the women of Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, and Granada; and when you compare it to the motion of a swan on the water, a fish in the water, a bird in the air, it is the birds and the fishes that must feel complimented.