LITMIR.BIZ

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credibly informed, for nothing but the merely notifying the makers. They are the decoy-ducks, excepting that, though they have fine feathers, they have no bills.

      I am told that a fashionable tailor would be quite shy of an ill-made and vulgar looking customer; and generally charges his dislike in his bill, that he may lose him. I knew a portrait painter, that professed to decline, painting ugly people, upon that principle, and consequently his success was quite astonishing; every one he did paint was in better humour with himself, and was proud of his certificate of beauty when he named the artist. Were you and I, Eusebius, to presume to enter the saloon of a fashionable cutter, and order suits, they would be purposely so ill-made, that no one should suspect from whence they came. And we should ever wear them with a hitch of discomfort in some part or other. So that, were we to try our best at foppery, we could not now succeed. I have tried it upon various occasions, and convinced myself that I was not born to it, and certainly neither of us has acquired a second nature that any tailor would recognise. A tailor's man, like the poet, must be born with nature's fit, or nothing else will fit him, – "nascitur non fit." Some wear their limbs so loosely, that they move them as do those German toys, whose legs you see children jerk with a string. The best Sartorial artist can make nothing of them; they are a mockery even upon the manufacture of "journeymen," they "imitate nature so abominably."

      How I came to be a sloven! Well, if I am a sloven, which I hardly know how to admit, and if I am a little in love with a kind of genteel slovenry, how came I by it? I did not take to it naturally, as you did, Eusebius; I caught it. And once caught, however we may upon occasions throw it off, it returns like an influenza, and becomes a continual habit. Few, indeed, are there who are not born with a contrary propensity, inheriting it from their mothers, whose preparations for the coming offspring were of the finest, the ventum textilem, as Apuleius calls it, – woven wind. Early, indeed, in his day of existence, is the little infant taught to show off, both his nude and his finery, and to hear the beauty of both commended. Thus is vanity engendered in the bud. You were a born genius, and exempt from the cradle from this visible mark of frailty. It was not so with me; I was an incipient fop before I could walk. And now I remember, Eusebius, that I sent you a letter some years ago, that should have answered, though perhaps imperfectly, your question. It was a "passage of autobiography," giving you an account of my first entrance at a public school, and how I was "breeched." How one Mr. Flight, after much tugging and pulling, by himself and foreman, did contrive to fit me into a pair of mouse-colour leather inexpressibles, – a good name for them, too, for I was hardly pressible in or out of them. Do you not remember my narration of the second time of putting them on, on my first morning at Winchester College, while the chapel bell was going, and I not yet fitted in; and how at last I did contrive to get some portion of me into them, and to fasten one button, and how I ran (but that word won't express the movement I made) breathless into the chapel, and on kneeling down, the button gave way to my shame, discomfort, and disgrace, exposure, ridicule. I might parody what the cock said to the fox,

      "The master my defeat, and all the school-boys, see."

      This was my first disgust at my own personal appearance. I hated my leathers; but they stuck to me, nevertheless, – my wardrobe contained nothing but leathers. I was like the dog that had killed his first lamb, forced to wear the skin, that became more odious every day. Here was a first distaste to dress. The fit was uncomfortable enough; but, besides, I was a subject of ridicule.

      Time, with its wear and tear, took off the pride of my nether garment, and affected at length a kind of reconciliation between us. We fitted each other better, and both entered into a compact of mutual slovenry. Things won't last for ever, although, in those days, the trade did affect to manufacture a material they called "everlasting." As the quotation from an old song will show:

      "And this my old coat, which is threadbare to-day,

      May become everlasting to-morrow."

      With new breeches come new manners, new ideas. Foppery takes growth again, though it is somewhat tender; struggles for life, but somehow or other acquires strength in the struggle. You contend against it, you wrestle with it, and, by a kind of enchantment, it becomes the tailor Antæus, and rises from every defeat a bigger man than ever. Behold me, let me stand for my picture, Ãtatis 18, Scholæ Wintoniensis alumnus. The date is at present unmentionable, – it will be found one of these days at the back of the canvass; behold me at the college gates, turning my back, for about my last holidays, upon those statuesque antique worthies, Sophocles, Euripides, Ãschylus. We have shaken hands finally with the sublime Longinus, preferring for the time a "sublime and beautiful" of our own, a butterfly of the first down. On second thoughts, I am not quite fit to stand there yet; I must describe my preliminary state. My boots, I rather think, my first boots, had come home the night before; boots then were no more like boots now, than are loose trousers to Mr. Flight's mouse-coloured tights. There was nearly the same process of pulling and tugging to get them on, and when once on, the revocare gradum was next to an impossibility. The leather, too, was of a more soaky oily kind, I suppose, and stuck like adhesive plaster, and drew like that medicated material. My boots were on, over-night, but no tug of war, no steam power of man or men – for we all tugged, and all steamed – could get them off. So it was determined I should sleep in them. It was very well so to determine, but sleep, as the negro said, "hab no massa," and would not obey. The bootmaker had advised and disappeared. It was soon found a just observation, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Sleep would not be bed ridden, for I was booted, possibly spurred; not even a classical charm would do,

      "Heus, al quis long â sub nocte, puellæ,

      Brachia nexa tenens ultro te somne repellit,

      Inde veni."

      Sleep was only the more obstinate, and preferred better society, or worse. Sleep has been too much petted by panegyrists, till he has learnt ill manners, lies down with the clown and the drunkard, for whom he leaves the presence and courting arms of suffering beauty, – such were my thoughts in those youthful classical and romantic days, and the above passage was most likely Latinised, – "shown up." Probatum est.

      I must hasten on, for I am, though booted, not dressed yet. With a sickening sensation, at the earliest gray light of a midsummer dawn, did I put on my clothes – my bran-new, in which I was to go out into the sunshine of life. First, there was a pair of bright orange-colour plush breeches; a light buff waistcoat with a sham-red under; a coat – no – nor jacket nor coat, but a beautiful tailor-creation, a coatee; colour, green; buttons, shining metal. My boots were of the kind called tops.

      Now I am ready to stand at the college gates for my picture, whip in hand, though a chaise is waiting for me and two more. My "copartners in exile" temporary, are waiting for me. They vociferate impatience. Is the portrait finished? Then complete it at your leisure, secundum artem. I am off. But while I have been standing for this portrait, the sun has risen; it is intensely hot. Heat of weather, tight boots, and swelling legs and limbs, are doing their work in and out of me. I am in a sad perspiration; and so off we go. We had reached the first mile-stone; then I discover I had left my purse behind me. Out I leap, run all the way back to "chamber," and away again to the chaise. I have at this moment a painful remembrance of that short pedestrian excursion – the heat intense, the orange-yellow plush flushing up into my face, the glare of buttons, the now-agony of my booted legs and feet, the difficulty of making the needful speed, and fear of the practical joke of leaving me behind – altogether these pains and discomforts put me into a kind of bilious fever, so that, if I did not loathe myself, I did most thoroughly my clothes. From that day I took a disgust to yellows, any thing glaring – abhorred my orange-plush: and I do not believe I had any symptom of foppery about me for three years after that memorable time. There is, indeed, a miniature portrait of me extant, taken about that period: it has a dash of powder in the hair, a rather smirking look; and there is a blue coat, metal buttons, the yellow waistcoat and red under; but I suspect these are not out of my wardrobe. They are from Mr Carmine's recipe-book of portrait costume, and may be found in page 6, lettered, "For very young gentlemen." I am pretty sure the dress, at least as it looks there, was not mine; for I remember well a remonstrance from my parent about that time, thus – "My son, you are too great a sloven."

      I never quite recovered this; but

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