A gentleman once said, in defence of Shakspeare, that his vulgar

characters, though low, were natural. Voltaire, to whom this was said,

observed the advantage to be derived from such an assertion by one who,

like himself, hated Shakspeare:—“Avec permission, mon derrière est

bien dans la nature, et cependant je porte culotte.” This illustration

reminds me of a stage pair of breeches, which, some eighty years ago,

had wellnigh killed that fair and fairly-reputable actress, Miss Maria

Macklin. She was famous for her male characters, and for her taste in

dressing them; Dejazet has not a better taste in this respect. But Miss

Macklin unfortunately had not only worn the male garment repeatedly, but

she was in the habit of buckling the garter portion of it so tightly,

that the result was a large and dangerous swelling in the knee, which,

we are told by Kirkman and Cooke, “from _motives of delicacy_, she

would not suffer to be examined till it had increased to an alarming

size!” An operation however was successfully performed, and she bore

it courageously; but she never regained her strength, and she died the

victim of false delicacy and a little vanity.

But, false or not, her delicacy was very like that of Mary of Burgundy,

who died in consequence of over-modesty, in concealing an injury in the

thigh, caused by a fall from a horse. Mary’s husband, Maximilian, had his

delicate scruples too,—that is, on one point—the point of putting on a

shirt, which he would never do in the presence of a _valet_. The idea of

doing what Louis XIV. so regularly did,—namely, put on a shirt, and that

sometimes a rather dirty one, in presence of a roomful of people,—would

have made the modest and moneyless Maximilian turn pale with disgust.

Perhaps however Maximilian hated shirts, because they were not of German

invention. Like the old gentleman in the ‘Wasps’ of Aristophanes, who,

being desired to put on a pair of Lacedæmonian boots, excuses himself

on the plea that one of his toes is πάνυ μισολάκωυ—altogether hostile

to the Lacedæmonians; a bit of wit, by the way, which honest Sheridan

has fitted on to the character of Acres, who hates French dancing terms

for the reason that his feet don’t understand _pas_ this and _pas_ that;

and that he decidedly has most “Anti-Gallican toes.” This expression

is decidedly a plagiarism from the admirable low-comedy scene in the

‘Wasps,’ where good Master Bdelycleon so daintily dresses his father

Philocleon, the Athenian Dicast, and gallantly compliments him at last,

by comparing him to “a boil covered with garlic.”

The Aristophanic incident recalls to my memory one of a somewhat similar

quality, which really occurred some years ago at Gosport. Mr. Joseph

Gilbert, who had been attached to the astronomical service in Captain

Cook’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus, and whose name was

conferred by the great navigator on “Gilbert’s Island,” resided at

Gosport; where, according to the fashion of the day, he, like the Count

d’Artois, wore very tight leather breeches. He had ordered his tailor

to attend on him one morning, when his granddaughter, who resided with

him, had also ordered her shoemaker to wait upon her. The young lady was

seated in the breakfast-room, when the maker of leather breeches was

shown in; and, as she did not happen to know one handicraftsman more than

the other, she at once intimated that she wished him to measure her for

a pair of “leathers,” for, as she remarked, the wet weather was coming,

and she felt cold in “cloth.” The modest tailor could hardly believe his

ears. “Measure you, Miss?” said he with hesitation. “If you please,”

said the young lady, who was remarkable for much gravity of deportment;

“and I have only to beg that you will give me plenty of room, for I am

a great walker, and I do not like to wear anything that constrains me.”

“But, Miss,” exclaimed the poor fellow in great perplexity, “I never in

my life measured a lady; I⸺” and there he paused. “Are you not a lady’s

shoemaker?” was the query calmly put to him. “By no means, Miss,” said

he; “I am a leather-breeches maker, and I have come to take measure not

of you, but Mr. Gilbert.” The young lady became perplexed too, but she

recovered her self-possession after a good common-sense laugh, and sent

the maker of breeches to her grandpapa.

Rosemary-lane was not only of old, and under its name of Rag Fair, a

great mart for cast-off garments, but especially, by some freak of

ochlocratic fashion, for breeches. It has had the honour of being

noticed by Pope as “a place near the Tower of London, where old clothes

and frippery are sold;” and, says Pennant, “the articles of commerce

by no means belie the name. There is no expressing the poverty of the

goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a

purchaser, observing me to look on him with great attention, called out

to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that

man, ‘for,’ says he, ‘I have actually clothed him for fourteen pence.’”

And in the ‘Public Advertiser’ for February 14, 1756, we read, as an

incident of the locality “where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair,”

that “Thursday last one Mary Jenkins, who deals in old clothes in Rag

Fair, sold a pair of breeches to an old woman for sevenpence and a pint

of beer. Whilst they were drinking it in a public-house, the purchaser,

in unripping the breeches, found quilted in the waistband eleven guineas

in gold, Queen Anne’s coin, and a thirty-pound banknote, dated in 1729,

which last she did not know the value of till after she sold it for a

gallon of twopenny purl.”

To go a little further back, I may say that the Reformation had other

results besides those usually recorded; thus that great event was no

sooner accomplished than the brokers and sellers of old apparel took

up their residence in Hounsditch, where their great enemy, the Spanish

Ambassador, had previously had a residence. Their locality was then “a

fair field, sometime belonging to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, at

Aldgate.” “Where gott’st thou this coat, I mar’le,” says Wellbred to

Brainworm, in Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ “Of a Houndsditch man,

Sir,” answers Brainworm; “one of the devil’s near kinsmen, a broker.”

We have another portion of dress whose origin dates from a serious

personage and from eventful times. I allude to that terror of gentlemen

who do not possess that which frogs and properly-built men alone possess

in common,—namely, calves;—I allude, I say, to “pantaloons.” This

tight-fitting garment was once part of the official costume of the great

standard-bearer of the Venetian Republic. He carried on his banner the

Lion of St. Mark, and he was the _Piantaleone_, or Planter of the Lion,

around whose glorious flag and tightly-encased legs the battle ever raged

with greatest fury, and where victory was most hotly contended for. The

tight parti-coloured legs of the tall Piantaleone were the rallying

points of the Venetians. Where _his_ thighs were upright, the banner was

sure to be floating in defiance or triumph over them; and Venice may be

said to have stood upon the legs of her Pantaloons. He who once saved

states was subsequently represented as the most thoroughly battered

imbecile of a pantomime. But therein was a political revenge. Harlequin,

Clown, and Columbine represented different states of Italy, whose delight

it was to pillory Venice by beating her nightly under the guise of the

old buffoon “Signor Pantaloon.” The dress has survived the memory of this

fact, though the dress too is almost obsolete.

In the last paragraph there is the phrase “I say” interpolated, the

use of which reminds me of a tailor-like comment made upon it. Erskine

writing to Boswell, or Boswell to Erskine, I forget now which, remarks

that “a sentence so clumsily worded as to require an ‘I say’ to keep it

together, very much resembles, in my candid opinion, a pair of ill-mended

breeches.”

The article of _braccæ_ is suggestive of _buttons_; and touching these,

I may observe that there is a curious law extant with regard to them. It

is, by Acts of Parliament passed in three reigns,—William III., Anne, and

George I.,—perfectly illegal for tailor to make, or mortal man to wear,

clothes with any other buttons appended thereto but buttons of brass.

This law is in force for the benefit of the Birmingham makers; and it

further enacts, not only that he who makes or sells garments with any but

brass buttons thereto affixed, shall pay a penalty of forty shillings

for every dozen, but that he shall not be able to recover the price he

claims, if the wearer thinks proper to resist payment. Nor is the Act a

dead letter. It is not many weeks since, that honest Mr. Shirley sued

plain Mr. King for nine pounds sterling, due for a suit of clothes.

King pleaded non-liability on the ground of an illegal transaction,

the buttons on the garment supplied having been made of cloth, or bone

covered with cloth, instead of gay and glittering brass, as the law

directs. The judge allowed the plea; and the defendant having thus gained

a double suit without cost, immediately proceeded against the defendant

to recover his share of the forty shillings for every dozen buttons which

the poor tailor had unwittingly supplied. A remarkable feature in the

case was, that the judge who admitted the plea, the barrister who set

it up, and the client who profited by it, were themselves all buttoned

contrary to law!

If I were writing an Encyclopædia of Trades, I would be as elaborate as

Dryasdust on the manufacture of buttons of all sorts of metal, more or

less costly; of wood, bone, ivory, horn, leather, paper, glass, silk,

wool, cotton, linen, thread, flock, compressed clay, etc. etc.—so that

both my readers and myself have a lucky escape. As the age however is

statistical in its inclinations, I will save my credit by remarking that

at Birmingham, the chief seat of button-manufacture, there are not less

than five thousand persons engaged in the manufacture of buttons, and

that half this number consists of women, and children.

Having said this, I turn to a new chapter, wherein there will be

something more of statistics, and something new about stockings.

STOCKINGS.

“Troth, Master Inkpen, thou hast put thy foot

Into a pretty subject.”—OLD PLAY.

When the old trunkhose was found to fray the sacred epidermis of

Christian kings and queens, the first fruits of a remedial discovery were

presented for the benefit of the illustrious sufferers. Thus we hear that

when stockings were first known in Europe, a Spanish grandee manifested

his loyalty and love for his Queen, by presenting a pair to the Prime

Minister, with a request that that official would place them at, if not

on, the feet of his sovereign lady. The Minister was shocked at the

grandee’s assurance and lack of modesty. “Take back thy stockings,” said

he, “and name the thing not again; for know, O foolish Sir Duke, that the

Queen of Spain has no legs!”

Our Henry III., less nice with regard to his own sister the Princess

Isabella, did not scruple to present her with a pair of stockings of

cloth, embroidered with gold.

These cloth hose went out of fashion in the reign of Elizabeth. Her

silk-woman, Montague, had presented her Majesty with a pair of black knit

silk stockings; and these were so pleasant to the legs of “England,” that

her Majesty discarded hot cloth for ever. She found double comfort in

the first; namely, to herself, and further comfort that by adopting them

she was encouraging a home-made article. The first pair of English-knit

worsted stockings were worn by Elizabeth’s Peer, “proud Pembroke.” They

had been imitated from an Italian knit pair by William Rider, apprentice

to Thomas Burdett, at the Bridge foot, opposite St. Magnus’ Church;

and their presentation to Pembroke was, doubtless, profitable to the

apprentice.

Disappointed love has been the cause of various dire effects, but I do

not know that it ever caused effect so singular as when it invented

a stocking-frame. This too was in Elizabeth’s time. In those golden

days, Will Lee, of Woodborough, in Norfolk, was a student at Cambridge;

somewhat given to maidens as well as to mathematics, but not so utterly

wasting his time with the former pleasant trifles but that he found both

learning and leisure to achieve an M.A. degree, and obtain a Fellowship.

Master Lee was especially addicted to talk agreeable nonsense to an

honest lass in the town, who gained her living, and increased the smiles

on her pretty face, by knitting stockings, to her very great profit. Now

this Cambridge damsel did not care the value of a dropped stitch for

such love as rich Will Lee brought her at sundown every coming eve; and

she told him as much. “Ay, marry!” said the vindictive lover, “then thou

shalt rue thy words and thy contempt.”—“_Marry_ scenteth of Rome,” said

the orthodox knitter; “and thou art as false in love as in faith.”

Master Lee however was a “fellow” who was true to his word. He was piqued

at being rejected,—_he_, a gentleman, by a pert knitter of stockings;

and he took but a base way of revenging his pique. He had sat knitting

his brow in vain, when all at once the thought struck him that he would

knit stockings too, and that by a process which should ruin the poor

damsel, who, poor as she was, despised an unworthy gentleman and scholar.

Thereupon he actually invented and set up the stocking-frame. He first

worked at it himself, and then taught his squire-brothers, and his

gentle relations; and finally he opened a manufactory at Calverton in

Nottinghamshire, and made stockings for the Maiden Queen.

All the hand-knitters were in despair, and they left no means untried

to bring the new invention into disrepute. Nor did they try in vain,

for Will Lee was driven out of England by the force of the coalition

against him. He set up his frames at Rouen, and drove a “roaring trade”

there, which was however interrupted by the confusion which followed upon

the assassination of Henri IV.; and the inventor of the stocking-frame

ultimately died at Paris, poorer than the humble knitting-maiden whom he

tried to ruin in two ways, and failed in both.

And a double moral may be drawn upon this story as neatly as two

stockings upon a pair of becoming legs. Swains too lightly given of

phrase in honest maidens’ ears may reflect, as they pull on their hose,

that treachery, as in the case of Will Lee, brought that gentlemanly

knave to want even a foot to the stockings he had made at his own frame.

Maidens, on the other hand, may as profitably reflect, when similarly

engaged, that they had better knit stockings than lend ear to the wicked

words of a fool; and that if once a hole be made in the stocking of their

reputation, the most skilful darning will hardly repair, and can never

conceal, the permanent injury.

And _à propos_ of darning, though it be not at all so to the above story,

Shuter was one day reproached by a brother actor that he had a hole in

his stocking, and the friend advised inimitable Ned to have it darned. “I

will not be such an ass,” exclaimed the original Sir Anthony Absolute; “a

hole in the stocking is an accident that may happen to any gentleman, but

a darn is premeditated poverty.”

King James I. was willing to do what would have shocked even

Shuter,—namely, wear borrowed stockings. There is a letter extant in

which that monarch asks a noble to lend him the “scarlet hose with the

gold clocks,” on a particular day on which he was desirous of giving the

French Ambassador “an extraordinary idea of his magnificence!”

This idea would never have entered the head of his great predecessor

Henry VIII., of whom Stowe, the tailor, says:—“You shall understand

that Henry VIII. did only wear cloth hose, or hose cut out of ell-broad

taffeta, unless by great chance there came a pair of silk stockings from

Spain. King Edward VI.,” he adds, “had a pair of Spanish silk stockings

sent him as a great present.”

While upon these times I may add, that when Elizabeth made Knights of

the Garter those great noblemen, the Duc de Montmorenci, and the Lords

Burleigh, Chandos, Essex, and Grey of Wilton, the Queen distinguished her

favourite Burleigh from the rest, by buckling the garter about his knee

herself; and this is said to have been the first occasion on which this

personal favour was conferred by the hands of a female sovereign, and to

have given rise to the exclamation, first uttered by the offended prudes,

of “’Ods Stars and Garters!”

I have read somewhere of stockings made out of the human hair, and how

the pretty conceit was adopted by lovers who were willing to entangle

their legs, as well as heart, in their mistresses’ tresses. To be once

more statistical and useful, I have to add for your information, that

although we no longer export anything but cotton yarns, instead of the

manufactured article, to Saxony, our general export is still large;

saving of silk stockings, of which we send abroad annually only some

60,000 pairs. Two hundred and fifty thousand dozen pairs of cotton

stockings go abroad annually to deck foreign legs, and about half that

amount of worsted,—the latter being generally sold by weight. Finally, I

conclude with the remarkably interesting statistical fact, that a lady

always takes off her left stocking last!

The possibility that this bit of statistical darning may excite a blush

on susceptible cheeks, reminds me of another fashion to which I will now

advert, under the title at the head of the following chapter. Having got

down to the feet, and shoes having been already incidentally noticed, we

will again mount upward.

“MASKS AND FACES.”

“Il faut ôter les masques des choses aussi bien que des

personnes.”—MONTAIGNE.

Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as

dress masks wrinkles. Perhaps this saying of his was founded on the

circumstance, that Queen Elizabeth not only wore dresses of increasing

splendour with increasing age, but that she also used occasionally to

appear masked on great gala occasions. The mode thus royally given, was

not however very speedily or generally followed. The introduction of

masks as a fashion appears to have “obtained,” as old authors call it,

only about the year 1660. Pepys, in 1663, says that he went to the Royal

Theatre, and there saw Howard’s comedy of ‘The Committee’ (known to us

in its new form and changed name of ‘The Honest Thieves’). He designates

it as “a merry but indifferent play, only Lacy’s part, an Irish footman,

is beyond imagination.” Among the company were Viscount Falkenberg, or

Falconbridge, with his wife, the third daughter of Cromwell. “My Lady

Mary Cromwell,” he goes on to say, “looks as well as I have known her,

and well clad; but when the house began to fill, she put on her vizard,

and so kept it on all the play; _which of late is become a great fashion_

among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So,” he adds,—and it

shows, does that sighed-forth “_So!_” the melancholy consequence of

leading wives into temptation,—“So to the Exchange, to buy things, with

my wife; among others a vizard for herself.”

Certainly that pretty precisian, Mary Cromwell, in a vizard at the play,

sounds oddly; one would as soon expect to hear of Mrs. Chisholm at a

Casino! No wonder Mrs. Pepys admired her!

But Mrs. Pepys was not very long content with her English vizard; for six

months after we find the little man, her husband, recording—“To Covent

Garden, to buy a maske at the French house, Madame Charett’s, for my

wife.” The taste of Mrs. Pepys was doubtless influenced by the example of

the court, “where six women, my Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Monmouth

being two of them, and six men, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arran, and

Monsieur Blanfort (Lord Feversham) being three of them, in vizards, but

most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most gloriously.”

What Pepys thought of the fashion and the time is seen again by a sighing

comment—“God give us cause to continue the mirth!”

The fashion was still in full force in 1667; and to what purpose it

was used, and to what purpose it might be abused, may be seen in the

following extract.

“To the King’s House to ‘The Maid’s Tragedy,’ but vexed all the while

with two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased to have their

discourse, he being a stranger. And one of the ladies would and did sit

with her mask on through all the play; and, being as exceeding witty as

ever I heard woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; _but_ was, _I

believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality_. He would fain know who she

was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her

knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out

who she was, and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she

was but pulling off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also making

sport with him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant _rencontre_ I

never heard;” and then once more a groaning commentary,—“but by that

means lost the pleasure of the play wholly.”

In the following year Pepys makes record of his having been at

Bartholomew Fair with his wife and a party. We “took a link,” he says,

“the women resolving to be dirty, and walked up and down to get a coach;

and my wife being a little before me, had like to have been taken up

by one whom we saw to be Sam Hartlib. My wife had her vizard on; yet

we cannot say that he meant any hurt; for it was just as she was by a

coach-side, which he had, or had a mind to take up: and he asked her,

‘Madam, do you go in this coach?’ but as soon as he saw a man come to her

(I know not whether he knows me) he departed away apace.” By all which

we may see that a vizard at a fair was evidently “an outward and visible

sign,” recognized by the rakes and gallants of the locality.

A vizard in the Park, at dusk, was equally intelligible; and though the

men were not masked at that or any other hour, they were at that time and

place more than sufficiently disguised. “And _now_,” says Vincent, in Sir

George Etherege’s comedy of ‘Love in a Wood, or St. James’s Park,’—“now

a man may carry a bottle under his arm, instead of his hat, and no

observing, spruce fop will miss the cravat that lies on one’s shoulder,

or count the pimples on one’s face.” As at park and fair, so fell the

convenient covering into evil application at the play itself. The matter

is alluded to by the Widow Blackacre in the epilogue to the ‘Plain

Dealer:’—

“For as in Hall of Westminster

Sleek sempstress vends amid the Courts her ware;

So while we bawl, and you in judgement sit,

The visor-mask sells linen too i’ the pit.”

By the end of the seventeenth century the fashion of masks was being

tarnished by vulgarity; and the practice of concluding comedies with a

‘Marriage in a Mask,’ a ceremony which may not have been unusual, was

already considered as a stale device. Congreve winds up two of his

comedies, ‘The Old Bachelor’ and ‘Love for Love,’ with this jovial sort

of bouquet.

The mode however still held on at the theatre. The latter was never

more licentious than now, and the ladies never so much loved to resort

thither. Our great grandmothers however, when young, were extremely

modest: many of them were afraid of venturing to a new play till their

lovers assured them they might do so without offence to their exquisite

delicacy. The bolder spirits, still modest but impatient, went in

masks,—not unwilling to listen to savoury uncleanness, but so modest

that they could not bear any one to see that they did _not_ blush at

it. “Such incidents as these,” says the ‘Spectator,’ “make some ladies

wholly absent themselves from the playhouse; and others never miss the

first night of a new play, lest it should prove too luscious to admit of

their going with any countenance to the second;”—a most exquisite reason.

It was good enough however to authorize vizards; and the theatre became

something like what Nat Lee in his ‘Nero’ describes Mount Ida to have

been,—

“Where the gods meet and dance in masquerade!”

But Mount Ida had something divine about it, which our stage in the days

of vizards certainly had not. As Joe Haines said to his masked audience,

in the concluding lines of the prologue to the very play just named—

“All tragedies, egad! to me sound oddly;

I can no more be serious than you godly.”

The fashion, after it had been indifferently well worn by the ladies, of

course fell to their maids, and Abigail wore the vizard which Lady Betty

dropped. In Malcolm’s ‘London’ (eighteenth century) a writer is quoted,

whose communication shows whither the masks had fallen in 1731. It is

in a letter on “Boxing Day,” and in it occurs the following passage:—“My

friend next carried me to the upper end of Piccadilly, where, one pair of

stairs over a stable, we found near a hundred people of both sexes (_some

masked_, others not), a great part of which were dancing to the music of

two sorry fiddles. It is impossible to describe this medley of mortals

fully; however, I will do it as well as I can. There were footmen,

servant-maids, butchers, apprentices, oyster and orange women, and

sharpers, which appeared to be the best of the company. This horrid place

seemed to be a complete nursery for the gallows. My friend informed me

it was called ‘a threepenny hop;’ and while we were talking, to my great

satisfaction, by order of the Westminster justices, _to their immortal

honour_, entered the constables and their assistants, who carried off all

the company that was left; and had not our friend been known to them, we

might have paid dear for our curiosity.”

After all, Justice was here, as usual, uncommonly blind; for the boxing

party, masked or not, was not more offensive against _bonos mores_ than

the Ranelagh parties, where powdered “bloods” percolated their dreadfully

luscious nonsense through the filter on the faces of the masked “belles.”

And besides, masking at holiday-time had long been a privilege of the

people. In ‘Vox Graculi’ (1623), above a century prior to the last date,

I find it stated of Twelfth Night—“On this night, much masking in the

Strand, Cheapside, Holborn, and Fleet-street.”

I have already noticed how our exceedingly precious grandmothers used to

resort to the theatres with covered faces instead of stopped-up ears.

The ears of the public did however rise angrily at last; the palled

appetite loathed the long-served food. A society was formed “for the

reformation of manners, for immoral words and expressions _contra bonos

mores_, uttered on the stage.” The society retained hired informers,

who sat in the pit, took down the naughty words and the names of the

speakers, and then entered a prosecution against the utterers. They were

driving a pretty trade, for the benefit of modesty and the suppression

of masks, when all at once Queen Anne, sipping her hollands, gently

bethought herself that these spies were flourishing by the abundance

of that which they feigned desire to put down; and indeed the fellows

were like some of our professional missionaries of the _pavé_, who steal

spoons from chop-houses, and have as many wives as Rugantino. The Queen

accordingly crushed the trading prosecutions by a “Nolle prosequi,” and

took the matter into her own hands. She issued a “royal command” for the

better regulation of the theatres, whereby she left to her Master of the

Revels “the special care that nothing be acted in either of the theatres

contrary to religion or good manners, upon pain of our high displeasure,

and of being silenced from further acting.”

Now, leaving to a Master of the Revels the care of suppressing revelry on

the stage, was very much like entrusting to Satan the suppression of sin.

However, so it was; but her Majesty tore the masks off herself, or rather

threatened to do so, as thus:—

“We do hereby strictly command that no person, of what quality soever,

presume to go behind the scenes, or come upon the stage, either before

or during the acting of any piece; that no woman be allowed or presume

to wear a vizard mask in either of the theatres; and that no persons

come into either house without paying the price established for their

respective places.”

Good Queen Anne issued this decree in the second year of her reign,

and it had just the effect that might have been expected. The houses

played ‘London Cuckolds’ to vizards of masked ladies, as usual, on the

9th of November; and Pinkethman roared his buffoonery in his booth near

Hyde Park during May Fair. What then did her Majesty deem contrary to

religion and good manners? Well, I really do not know; but I _do_ know

that, in the very year of the decree, she herself had the comedy of ‘Sir

Solomon’ acted before her and her ladies at court; and if she could

listen to that without a blush, or a mask to conceal the want of it, why

she must have construed immorality, and her royal command against it, in

a very mild sense indeed.

The ladies were uncommonly angry with their liege mistress Anne for

this decree, and the sentiment is exemplified by the song so popular at

the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre in 1704,—‘The Misses’ Lamentation, for want

of their Vizard Masques at the Theatre.’ The “misses” however, and the

matrons too, had long before this indulged in a fashion which was not

dropped until long subsequent to the fall of the mask.

About five years after Mrs. Pepys had taken Samuel for her liege lord,

that is to say in 1660, she first essayed to add new lustre to her charms

by affixing a few “beauty spots” to her face. “This is the first day,”

says he, on the 30th of August of the year above named, “that ever I

saw my wife wear black patches since we were married.” It was some time

before the gentleman could make up his mind to the propriety of wearing

these adjuncts to beauty. In October, he expresses his astonishment

that even Lord Sandwich should “talk very high how he would have a

French cook, and a master of his horse, and his lady and child to wear

black patches; which methought was strange, but he has become a perfect

courtier.” It was perhaps because the court patronized patches, that

Pepys permitted them on his wife. Hitherto the lady had worn them without

the marital sanction, but in November we find him saying, “My wife seemed

very pretty today, it being the first time I had given her leave to weare

a black patch.” And therewith his admiration increased; and some days

later, on seeing his wife close to the Princess Henrietta (daughter of

Charles I.) at court, on the occasion of a visit she paid to her brother

Charles II., as Duchess of Orléans, he remarks: “The Princess Henrietta

is very pretty; ... but my wife standing near her, with two or three

black patches on, and well-dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than

she.”

A century subsequent to this, patches still kissed the cheek of beauty;

and as professors taught how to wield the fan, so French essays were

“done into English,” and instruction therein given as to the secret

of applying them in an artful manner, how to arrange them with the

most killing effect, and how to so plant them about the eye that the

expression desired should be at once achieved,—whether of proud disdain,

amorous languor, or significant boldness. They were the hieroglyphics

of vanity and of party spirit; and beaux and politicians read in the

arrangement of patches not only the tender but the political principles

of the wearer.

Despotism too had something to do with patches. Thus Lady Castlemaine

fixed the fashion of mourning, by “forcing all the ladies to go in black,

with their hair plain, and without spots.” It is a curious trait of the

manners of other times that a royal concubine should order the tiring of

honest women. She could hardly have influenced that “comely woman,” the

Duchess of Newcastle, who went about, in the second Charles’s time, with

a velvet cap, her hair about her ears, “many black patches, because of

pimples about her mouth,” naked-necked, and in a black _justaucorps_.

The ladies marked or patched, the gentlemen red-heeled and similarly

“nosed,” had no greater delight than in killing time by looking at the

“puppets;” and the fashion of these same puppets is a thing of such

antiquity and such duration, that I may fairly add a chapter thereon to

those through which I have already been accompanied by the courteous and

indulgent reader.

PUPPETS FOR GROWN GENTLEMEN.

“They do lie in a basket, Sir; they are o’ the small

players,—and as good as any, none dispraised, for dumb

shows.”—BEN JONSON: _Bartholomew Fair_.

Madame de Puysieux was a witty and vivacious lady. Among her recorded

sayings is one that exceedingly well suits me for the nonce. “I would

rather,” she said, “be occasionally found looking at puppets than

listening to philosophers.”

There was doubtless some reason in this; but the fact is also

indubitable, that puppets and philosophy are not so far apart. The latter

has often condescended to illustrate the former. The learned and serious

Jesuit, Mariantonio Lupi, devoted his brief leisure to writing upon them.

The great mathematicians, Commendino d’Urbino and Torniano di Cremona,

stooped to play with and perfect them. Le Sage and Piron wrote plays for

them. Ben Jonson brought them on the stage. Addison has immortalized them

in stately verse; and Haydn seriously addressed himself to composing

exquisite music, wherewith to grace their motion. These are but modern

illustrations. We shall however presently discover, that the great and

gifted men of a very remote antiquity were wont also to turn from the

consideration of mighty problems, and carve puppets that should excite

ecstasy in the wide world of “the little people.”

Surely there is dignity in a subject treating even of toys that have

been in fashion for three thousand years, and have afforded amusement

to two-thirds of the human race. The subject was largely discussed in

France not many years since, by M. Charles Magnin, a gentleman who, in

love with his plaything, had recourse to every source of information, and

who brought away from all something worth knowing. M. Magnin shows that

the gravest of authors are at issue as to the origin of the puppet race.

Charles Nodier, however, traces it to the doll that lies in unconscious

felicity in the arms of youthful and precocious maturity. M. Magnin

maintains, on the other hand, that the puppet does not spring from the

hearth, but from the altar. The rude god whittled out of a gnarled bough

is, with him, the undoubted sire of the universe of dolls. The puppet

served for pious, before it was suited to domestic, purposes; and it

excited awe long before it won laughter or excited admiration. It lived

in a wood, and ruled savages. As civilization advanced, it changed its

habits, form, and features; and, ceasing to affright man, undertook the

happier task of amusing him.

Such is the legendary record of puppets. We must turn over the graphic

pages of the ‘Father of History,’ to find the first authentic mention

of their employment. The guests at an Egyptian feast, when they grew

hilarious, were called back to sober propriety by the exhibition of

a little skeleton, and the admonition to reflect upon the lesson it

conveyed. The British Museum possesses many of these figures, as well as

others which appear to be toys that have been buried with their loved

little owners. There is some uncertainty on this point, however; for

it is known that on diseased persons it was the custom to place little

figures, supposed to represent the deity which had particular influence

over the part whereon the image was laid. I believe that the liver

was the only portion of the body that had not its peculiar divinity.

That obstinate organ has always defied gods and men. “In jecore nigro

nascuntur domini;” and over these even the Egyptian Pantheon availed

nothing.

Whether the figures in our Museum be actual toys, or counterfeit

presentments of very swarthy gods, it is not in every instance easy

to determine. From conjecture however we can turn to Herodotus; and

certainly that worthy Halicarnassian tells us, in his second book, that

in Egypt, on the festival of Osiris, or Bacchus, a puppet figure of the

joyous god, a cubit in height, with some indecent mechanism moved by

the pulling of a string, was carried in procession by the women. When

previously speaking of the figure of Pan, he says, that the deity in

question is worshiped under a form known not to be his real one, for

a reason, he adds, which he “had rather not mention.” So, in the case

of Bacchus, he confines himself to stating that there were “sacred and

mysterious reasons” for the same. We are now aware that the unseemly

practice was really a species of invocation that the earth might be

impregnated with prolific virtue.

We next arrive at articulated figures. The statue of Jupiter Ammon nodded

to the attendant priests when he was about to prophesy. So Apollo, at

Heliopolis, would not open his lips till his ministers had carried him

whither he would go. Aloft on the shoulders of his bearers, he guided

them as with reins. On being questioned, he graciously bowed his head, if

he approved; or fell back, if he dissented. When placed on the ground of

his temple, he was seen to ascend, without aid, till his head touched the

roof; and there he remained fixed till prayers brought him down again.

It is suggested that the magnet may have been employed to accomplish the

feat. How this may have been defies aught but conjecture.

Voluntary motion of inanimate objects was always an evidence of their

divinity. When Juno paid her celebrated visit to Vulcan, she found him

engaged in the manufacture of tripods, which moved about and performed

their office with a bustling air of the most zealous assiduity.

“Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed,

That, placed on living wheels of massy gold,

Wondrous to tell, instinct with spirit, roll’d

From place to place around the blest abodes,

Self-moved, obedient to the beck of gods.”

We have here in England, if not tripods, at least bipeds, who can

“instinct with spirit roll

From place to place.”

And this subject reminds me of Bacchus, generally. Now, my readers know

that there were of old not less than ten cities known by the name of

Nysa. At two of these, Nysa in India and Nysa in Ethiopia, Bacchus (Dio

Nysus) was held in extreme reverence. In the last-named city, Ptolemy

Philadelphus manifested his veneration for the god, by honouring the

deity’s great festival after a pleasing fashion. The King had a figure of

the joyous divinity made expressly for the occasion. It was eight cubits

in length, and was drawn through the city, attired in a tunic of yellow

and gold, with a Macedonian mantle hanging from the shoulders. The god

was seated in a car, and as he passed through the gazing crowds, he ever

and anon majestically arose, poured out, not wine, but milk, from a bowl,

and then solemnly re-seated himself.

Among the Greeks, Dædalus is famous, in legend at least, as the founder

of the art of figure-making. He is said to have flourished about a

thousand years before Christ; and despite what is generally told of him,

he was probably but a rude craftsman. He was the first who introduced

quicksilver into figures, and by this process he lent a sort of

Chinese-tumbling motion to a wooden image of Venus. Some of his figures

were so given to activity as to require being made fast when not wanted

to move, without which precaution they would, like the leg in the legend,

have continued running about without intermission.

All the Greek puppets belong to the Dædalus school; they were generally

of wood or baked clay, were set in motion by strings, and were invariably

of the feminine gender. It was customary to place them in the coffins

of young girls. M. Magnin quotes from Xenophon’s graphic description of

the banquet in the house of Callias, to demonstrate that the noblest

Athenians condescended to be amused with representations by puppets.

There is however not a word touching puppets throughout the lively

narrative of the learned and gallant Greek. The Syracusan showman therein

introduced exhibits a living boy and girl, who go through some rather

dangerous gymnastic exercises, which excite considerable disgust in the

mind of Socrates. That sage is much better pleased when the graceful

pair represent in his presence the ballet of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne.’

These children not only danced but sang; and if it be suggested that

the feat of singing might easily be contrived for a puppet by a clever

stage-manager, we may also suggest that the Syracusan speaks, on one

occasion, in answer to Socrates, so plainly as to leave no doubt that

“flesh, blood, and blue veins” entered into the composition of his

elegant little slave.

Antiochus Cyzenicus, half-brother to Antiochus Grypus—the huge-nosed

Antiochus—was celebrated as the inventor of puppets as well as of larger

machines; and his counterfeit animals, whose limbs simulated motion, were

as agreeable to his friends, as his engines, with unpronounceable names,

were horridly distasteful to his enemies.

In Greece again, Archytas the mathematician constructed for his young

acquaintances a hollow pigeon that could fly,—the original Montgolfier.

In like manner, Dædalus, who made quicksilvered tumblers, also

discovered the use of the wedge and the science of sailing; while Cnidus,

the great astronomer, not only regulated the year and brought the

celestial sphere from Egypt, but made all his little cousins glad by the

excellence of the puppets he invented, and the fantasticness of their

movements.

The public puppet-plays were fashionable in Greece after the theatres

had been suppressed by the Puritan Macedonian faction. The method

of representation was, in many respects, like that still followed

by the itinerant managers of wooden companies in our own days. The

like permanence of fashion has clung to our childish games. The old

_Muinda_ is the modern Blind-Man’s-Buff; _Chytrinda_ is Hot Cockles;

_Trigodiphasis_ is Bob-Cherry; and Scriblerus, we remember, permitted his

illustrious son to play at Puss-in-the-Corner, for the sufficient reason

that it was the _Apodidascinda_ of the ancients. There is one classical

game that has gone out of fashion, and I am not altogether surprised at

it, seeing that it consisted in one of the players standing on a round

ball, with his neck in a noose hung from above; in one hand he held a

knife. It was the part of his opponents to kick the ball from under his

feet. If, when this was done, he succeeded in cutting the rope, he won

the game; if not, he lost it, and got hanged.

To return to our figures, we may state that the Italian temples were

celebrated for their moving gods. In the fane of the two Fortunes at

Antium, the goddess moved both arms and head when that solemnity was

required. So at Præneste, the figures of the youthful Jupiter and Juno,

lying in the lap of Fortune, moved, and excited awe thereby. The marble

Servius Tullius is said to have shaded his eyes with his cold hand

whenever that remarkably strong-minded woman, his daughter and murderess,

passed before him.

It was a common thing for the images of the gods to turn away their

heads when displeased with the meats placed before them. This act filled

a whole district with terror, and excited a desire in the people to do

whatever the priests enjoined. When the Athenians were slow to desert

their capital and take to their ships, the sacred wooden dragon of

Minerva not only refused to eat his cakes, but rolled himself out of

the temple and down into the sea, as though to indicate to the people

the direction in which resided safety. As for the huge puppets used in

religious processions, nothing now exists like them, save in some of the

festival processions in Flemish towns. Our venerable city brethren, Gog

and Magog, are the ancient freemen of that guild. In some of the smaller

images our worthy friend Punch figures with his wonted _éclat_. M. Magnin

holds that the French _Polichinelle_ is not a descendant of the puppet

with the Phrygian bonnet, but an image caricaturing some old boasting

cuirassed captain of Gascony. The breast protuberance he considers to be

merely an exaggeration of the bowed cuirass,—an explanation which I am

far from feeling bound to honour with acceptance.

Puppets found favour at the hands of the early Fathers of the Church:

perhaps for the reason that more decency was observed in the speeches of

the shows than in those of the stage. The Fathers however were divided on

the point. Some advocated the use of every and any means whereby religion

could be furthered; others declared that nothing was lawful but what

was in itself holy. The fashion nevertheless prevailed, and allegorical

figures became common. The Fish, the Lamb, the Good Shepherd, and similar

representations gladdened the hearts of simple people, till the Church

planted her canons against them exclusively, and insisted upon the

adoption of figures of the Saviour in his human form.

The command was but slowly complied with. In the fourth century artists

had not got beyond the bust of Jesus. By the end of the seventh century,

we meet with the sacred figure in slight relief carved on the wooden

cross. It required full another century before the reluctant or incapable

artists achieved the complete anatomical figure hanging _from_ the cross.

But when this was once accomplished, progress was soon made beyond it;

and images of the Saviour and the Madonna, with movable limbs, set in

motion by strings, became common throughout Europe. We hear of one

gravely moving through Lucca on foot, and gravely blessing the people as

he passed along: this was the counterpart of the Bacchus at Nysa.

The Boxley Madonna was long the glory of Kent. It not only moved the

head, but opened and closed the eyes; and I would tell its story here, as

apt to the subject, but that I have already narrated it at some length in

the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’

The Rimini Madonna is but a poor plagiarism of Our Lady of Boxley.

Maundrill, at the end of the seventeenth century, saw an image of Christ,

so flexible, that it was difficult to distinguish, at a distance, between

it and a dead body. These figures were so often used to deceive the

people, that the employment of them was forbidden by several Councils;

but in vain. Some of them were of such exquisite workmanship, that

their makers were taxed with having the devil for an ally; and the

figure-makers generally were consigned to infamy.

One day, in the year 1086, the holy Abbot Thergius, attending at Cluny

to give investiture to some half hundred novices, refused conferring

the benediction upon one of them, under the plea, “Mechanicum ilium

esse et necromantiæ deditum.” And yet the abbot artists were among the

priests themselves; nay, were sometimes to be found among the Popes.

Sylvester II. is said to have constructed a brazen head. Roger Bacon

and Robert Greathead were celebrated for the same achievement; while

Albertus Magnus has the reputation of having constructed an _android_

or semblance of a man, of such perfection, that it would support an

argument with satisfaction to itself and discomfort to its opponents.

Thomas Aquinas, when young, ventured to enter upon a discussion with this

figure; when the _androide_ so perplexed the priest with his shower of

syllogisms, that the latter broke his head for his pains, and ruined his

argumentative powers for ever.

The ecclesiastical puppets were probably productions with more than mere

pretensions to rank among objects of art and science. The semi-religious

and popular puppets were too gross to deceive; and yet the great dragon

of Paris, slain by St. Marcel, whose _simulacrum_ dragged itself through

the city during the Rogation Days, was probably contemplated with as much

awe by the youthful beholders, us the sacred dragon of Minerva was at

Athens, by such of the citizens as lived before the innovating period of

the free-thinking Anaxagoras.

Galen speaks of puppets so anatomically perfect, that Heaven might have

taken a hint therefrom. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemaïs, too, referring to

effects following at long intervals, the impelling cause divinely given,

stumbles upon an unprofitable simile, and compares such effects to the

motion in the limbs of the puppet long after the showman has ceased to

pull the strings.

If our little actors fell into disuse from the thirteenth to the

fifteenth century, it was only to reappear in Italy with an _éclat_ which

they never previously enjoyed. Of modern puppets, Italy is the birthplace

and permanent home. In front of a puppet-show exists an equality of all

classes, who fraternize for the moment to enjoy the liberty which puppets

alone in the peninsula appear to possess. These imitate nature with such

perfection as to confer on their constructors the name of _artists_.

In the regular puppet-theatre, where none but wooden actors appear on

the stage, the scenery and accessories are in such due proportion with

the performers, that the eye yields ready consent to the illusion.

Burlettas, sparkling extravaganzas, melodramas, and even grand operas

are represented. In the latter case, the mute _prima donna_ on the stage

invariably answers by her expressive pantomime to the voice which is

uttered for her behind the scenes. And when a bouquet is flung to her,

her grateful emotion is, as Mr. Carlyle would say, “a noticeable thing.”

The puppet ballet-dancers are even more wonderful than their vocal

brethren. Rome extends to them the privilege of playing in the capital,

even in solemn seasons. Church-censorship is however strict, as might be

expected; and it evidences its care for the proprieties by requiring that

no female puppet shall appear on the stage without a pair of light blue

silk drawers! This is something to smile at; for morality at Rome is not

of a high character, and female immodesty there is almost as disgustingly

offensive as it is on our Ramsgate sands at the height of the bathing

season. Even Rome cannot beat _that_.

The private puppet-actors in Italy indulge in political allusions, to

the delight of an audience invited for the express purpose of enjoying

satirical allusions against the Government. In Florence, the private

companies are remarkable for their coarseness, to which they who pay

for the same do not object. In Milan, the fool of the puppet-stage is

invariably a native of Turin; while among the Piedmontese puppets, the

fool of the farce and the villain of the melodrama are of course of

Lombard origin.

The Spanish puppets are of Italian derivation. Torriani invented many in

order to amuse Charles V. in his retirement among the monks of St. Just.

These were so clever that the brotherhood suspected the artist of being

leagued with evil powers; but the uses to be drawn from these figures

were so apparent, that the Church of Spain employed them largely in the

working of miracles. The modern prince of puppets, our friend Punch,

never got thoroughly naturalized in Spain. The fact is, the unscrupulous

fellow is of Neapolitan descent; and since Naples revolted against the

Spanish government, _Pulcinello_ is looked upon as a very dangerous

person. Seneca, on the other hand, being a native of Cordova, is a great

favourite. His history is faithfully represented, with an addition that

reminds one of the new act put by the modest M. Dumas to one William

Shakspeare’s tragedy of Hamlet. This addition consists in the ascent of

the heathen philosopher to heaven; where, at the feet of the figure of

the Saviour, he recites the creed, and professes himself a Christian.

After all, this is not more absurd than the act of that Pope who

converted Trajan to Christianity three hundred years after that Emperor’s

death; and who had nearly canonized him to boot, in spite of the

remonstrance of the astounded College of Cardinals.

Although Punch was not originally French, he has always been greatly

esteemed in France. He was a highly honoured puppet, as the registers

of the royal treasury certify; _ex. gr._, “Paid to Brioché, the

puppet-player, for sojourning at St. Germain-en-Laye, during September,

October, and November, 1669, to divert the royal children, 1365

livres.” The royal children of France must have had enough of this

sort of amusement, the Dauphin particularly, who had already had two

months of puppet-playing before Brioché came, as is shown by the same

registry:—“Paid to François Daitelin, puppet-player, for the fifty-six

days he remained at St. Germain, to amuse Monseigneur le Dauphin (July

and August, 1669), 820 livres.”

Bossuet, the Dauphin’s tutor, persecuted both puppets and Protestants,

which, and especially the latter, were reckoned for a time among

the things that were reprobate and abominable. Brioché himself was

suppressed; but he had friends at court; and the King, who would

execute a Protestant for preaching, signed a decree which authorized the

mountebank to continue playing. Due gratitude was shown in return; and

among the favourite pieces represented at the famous fairs of St. Germain

and St. Laurent, was ‘The Destruction of the Huguenots.’

The puppet-plays at the fairs in Paris were got up with much

magnificence, and were wittily written,—but with as much indecency as

wit; particularly during the last years of Louis XIV. and the time of

the Regent. The puppets alone had full liberty of speech, when every

other sort of liberty was extinct. Le Sage and Piron, as I have said,

wrote pieces expressly for them. And while plays in France were acted in

puppet-shows, puppet-shows in England were introduced into plays. Of this

the ‘Bartholomew Fair’ of Jonson is a sufficient example. The _vogue_ of

the French puppets is proved by the fact that the Regent Duke of Orléans,

with his company of _roués_, often remained in the fair till long after

midnight, to witness representations where the coarser the wit the more

it was enjoyed.

All the _chefs-d’œuvre_ of the French stage were immediately parodied

on the puppet-boards; and saving the license of speech, the parody was

often superior to the original. It was so attractive that the regular

actors complained, and sought for the suppression of their wooden rivals.

But Punch and his brethren pleaded for their ancient privilege, “de

parler et de p⸺r.” The plea was held good, and the puppets triumphed

over the Thespians. The quarrel being a family one, it was of course

carried on with undying hostility. The puppet-players took every

opportunity of ridiculing the extravagances of the more serious stage.

When the custom of calling for “the author” of a successful new piece

was established, upon the example set of calling for Voltaire after the

first representation of ‘Merope,’ the puppets availed themselves of the

opportunity for caricaturing. “Le compère pressait Polichinelle de

lui faire entendre une de ses œuvres; et après avoir reçu une réponse

très-incongrue, le compère s’empressait de demander l’auteur! l’auteur!

satisfaction que s’empressait de lui donner Polichinelle, aux grands

éclats de rire de l’assemblée.”

The contrast with this will call up but a ghastly smile when we find

that while the crowd on the Place Louis XV. was waiting to witness the

execution of the King, Punch was being serio-comically guillotined in

one corner of the square, to the great delight of the spectators. Indeed

the ‘Vieux Cordelier’ tells us, that Punch daily filled up the intervals

of executions; and so varied the pleasures of the humane but impatient

multitude. But what neither the ‘Vieux Cordelier,’ nor M. Magnin tells

us, is the fate of this very Punch, or rather of the man and his wife

who exhibited the popular puppet. Their fate is recorded by the Marquis

de Custine. Punch, it appears, ventured on some jokes against the

Terrorists. His master and mistress were thereupon seized. They bore

their brief imprisonment with heroism, and they were executed on the spot

whereon had perished their sovereign and queen.

The puppets went down in the general hurricane of the Revolution, and

they only partially came again to the surface. To their ancient shows

on the Boulevard du Temple has succeeded a line of theatres; and the

chief resulting difference is, that very awkward men and women now enact

the most sacred subjects where puppets once did the same office less

revoltingly.

If a popular movement finally declared that the puppet dynasty had ceased

to reign, it was a despotic will that abolished the use of such effigies

in church spectacles. Louis XIV., on witnessing one of those sights at

Dieppe, was so shocked thereat that he ordered their general suppression.

The French word for puppet, _Marionnette_, applied originally only to

figures of the Virgin Mary; but, like the _Catrinette_ of the little

Savoyard, it has ceased to have an exclusive application.

With regard to puppets in England, those wooden ladies and gentlemen once

figured largely in our church-shows, interludes, and pageants. The names

of the puppet masters have come down to us, from Pad, Cookley, Powell,

and the _daughter_ of Colley Cibber, to no less a man than Curran, who,

taking upon himself, in sport, the charge of a show for one night, found

it so easy when speaking for the mute actors to maintain both sides of an

argument that he was _therefore_ convinced of his excellent aptitude for

the law.

Pepys, as usual, affords us again illustrations of the fashion which

attached to puppets in his day. From his brief journalizing we obtain a

world of information on this matter. Thus we find him recording:—“12th

Nov. 1661. My wife and I to Bartholomew Fayre, with puppets (which I had

seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I love

the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all,

but think it to be a lessening of it.” On the 9th May, in the following

year, we find him in Covent Garden, “to see an Italian puppet-play, that

is within the rayles there,—the best that ever I saw, and great resort

of gallants.” In a fortnight he takes poor Mrs. Pepys to the same play.

In October, he says:—“Lord Sandwich is at Whitehall, with the King,

before whom the puppet-plays I saw this summer in Covent Garden are

acted this night.” On the 30th August, 1667, being with a merry party at

Walthamstow, he left his wife to get home as well as she could; _he_ “to

Bartholomew Fayre, to walk up and down, and there, among other things,

find my Lady Castlemaine at a puppet-play, ‘Patient Grizell,’ and the

street full of people expecting her coming out. I confess I did wonder

at her courage to come abroad, thinking the people would abuse her;

but they, silly people, do not know the work she makes; and therefore

suffered her with great respect to take coach, and so away without any

trouble at all.”

The last allusion made by Pepys on this subject forms an admirable

commentary on the approving ecstasy expressed by the royalists at the

lashing which the “Precisians” received at the hands of Lantern’s puppets

in Jonson’s comedy. On the 5th September, 1668, Pepys is again on the

old ground, “to see the play ‘Bartholomew Faire,’ and it is an excellent

play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; _only_” (he adds)

“the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no

use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest.”

I began this chapter with a quotation from Puysieux—I may end it with

that just cited from Pepys; and therewith, lowering the curtain of my

little theatre, I beg the indulgence of my audience for the succeeding

portions of what I have respectfully to bring before them; something

more especially touching Tailors, and the Man whose making is to Tailors

due! First, however, to treat the matter reverently, let us inquire what

influenced the ancient corporation in their selection of a protecting

Saint.

TOUCHING TAILORS.

“Rem acu tetigisti.”—HORACE.

“You have treated of a matter about the needle.”—_Translated by

a Merchant Tailors’ Pupil._

“Sit merita Laus!”—ST. WILLIAM, ABP.

“Sit, merry Tailors.”—_Freely rendered by the Saint’s Chaplain._

WHY DID THE TAILORS CHOOSE ST. WILLIAM FOR THEIR PATRON?

“King David’s confessor is worth a whole calendar of

Williams.”—LUTHERAN TAILOR.

Why did the tailors choose St. William for their patron? Ah, _why_? I

confess it puzzles me to furnish a reply; and I would not be editor of

that pleasant paper ‘Notes and Queries,’ if my official hours were to be

passed in furnishing answers to such questions.

I can understand why St. Nicholas is the patron of children. The Saint

once came upon a dozen or two in a tub, cut up, pickled, and ready for

home consumption or foreign exportation, and he restored them all to life

by a wave of his wand,—of his hand, I should say, but I was thinking

of Harlequin; and thenceforth parents very properly neglected their

children, knowing that Nicholas was their commissioned curator.

I can comprehend why “St. John Colombine” is the patron saint of honest

workmen. I heard Dr. Manning, the other day, tell _his_ story from that

thimble of a pulpit in the Roman Catholic Chapel at Brook Green. This

John was a journeyman tailor (or of some as honest vocation) given to

strong drink and hot wrath. He was one day made insanely furious because

his real Colombine, his wife, had not got his dinner ready according to

order. The good housewife bethought her for a moment, and thereupon,

after turning aside, placed before him, not bread, but biography; not

a loaf and a salad, but the ‘Lives of the Saints.’ John dipped into

the same, devoured chapter after chapter, and fed so largely on the

well-attested facts, that he lost all appetite for aught besides. He

thenceforth so comported himself that future editors gave him a place in

the catalogue of the canonized; and the story, as told by that pale and

care-worn-looking Dr. Manning, is worth the shilling which you _must_

disburse if you would hear it. Certainly, I mean nothing disrespectful

to that sincere but seemingly unhappy man, when I say that so startling

was the story as introduced into a discourse upon the Spirit of the Lord

and they who are led by such Spirit, that I could not have been more

startled if, in the days of my youth, the Bleeding Nun in ‘The Travellers

Benighted’ had, in the midst of her most tremendous scene, tripped down

to the foot-lights and sung a comic song.

But this will not answer the query, “Why did the tailors choose St.

William for their patron?” Indeed, the digression I have made may be

taken for proof that I do not know how to answer the question. But let us

at least inquire.

First, there was the Savoyard Saint William, who, when an orphan,

abandoned the friends who would have protected him; and after wandering

barefooted to the shrine of that Saint whom English boys unwittingly

celebrate by their grottoes, “only once a year,” St. James of

Compostella, proceeded to the kingdom of Naples, where he withdrew to a

desert mountain, and passed his time in contemplating the prospect before

him. He lacerated his skin instead of washing it, and he patched his

own garments when he might have earned new ones by honest labour. But

he founded a community of monks and friars, and _ergo_ he is celebrated

by the hagiographers. A contempt for saponaceous applications, and a

disregard of upper appearance or under comfort, have decidedly descended

to the brotherhood of tailors from William of Monte Vergine.

Secondly, there was William of Champeaux, who founded the Abbey of St.

Victor at Paris. This William was a man of large learning and small

means; and he was well content to dine daily on a lettuce, a pinch of

salt, and a mouthful of bread. The shadows of dinners which form the

substance of tailors’ repasts, are reflections from the board of William

of Champeaux.

Thirdly, there was William of Paris, the familiar friend of St. Louis,

King of France. This bishop, next to piety, was famed for his knowledge

of politics; and as tailors have ever been renowned for knowing what

is going on “i’ the capitol,” and for discussing such goings on with

uncommon freedom, I think we may trace this characteristic of the race to

the news-loving and loquacious prelate of eight centuries ago.

Fourthly, there was St. William of Maleval, of sufficiently ignoble birth

to have been a tailor; and who did, in his youth and his cups, what

modern young tailors frequently offer to do under similar circumstances,

namely, enlist. If our useful friends have not imitated the latter

example set them by the Saint, we may trace their love of the pot, at

least, to the early model they found in their patron of Maleval; and if

often they find themselves in the station-house, lying upon no softer

bed than the bare ground, they doubtless find the reflection as feathers

to their bruised sides, that it was even thus that the founder of the

Gulielmites lay in a cave of the Evil Valley to which he gave a name

(Male Val), and which before was known by no better than the Stable of

Rhodes.

Fifthly, there was William of Gelone, Duke of Aquitaine, whom it took St.

Bernard twice to convert before he made a Christian of him; and who had

such gallant propensities that he might have been one of the couple sung

of in the ‘Bridal of Triermain,’ where of three personages it is said

that—

“There were two who loved their neighbours’ wives,

And one who loved his own.”

The well-known gallantry of the tailors therefore is an heirloom from

William of Aquitaine.

Sixthly, there was William sometime Archbishop of Bourges, who left to

the guild of whom we are treating the example which is followed by so

many of its members, and which consisted in utterly dispensing with a

shirt. He further never added to his costume in winter, nor diminished

anything in it in summer; and they who have taken St. William for a

patron are known, though not for the same reasons, to be followers of the

same fashion.

Then there was, seventhly, St. William of Norwich, whose father, after

hesitating whether to bind him apprentice to a tailor or a tanner, had

just placed him with the latter when the lad was seized upon by the Jews,

and by them tortured and crucified, in derision of Christ. On Easter Day

they put the body into a sack, and carried it into Thorpe Wood, where it

was afterwards discovered, and buried, with many miraculous incidents to

illustrate the funeral; and where was afterwards erected the chapel of

St. William in the Wood. Now, at first sight, it would appear difficult

to decide as to what the tailors’ guild derived from William of Norwich.

But it is only at first sight, and to those unaccustomed to follow a

trail, and not determined to find what they are looking for. In allusion

to what had befallen the body of St. William, or rather in memory of how

that body was conveyed away, after life had been expelled from it, the

Norwich tailors first adopted that now consecrated phrase of “getting the

sack,” and which phrase implies a loss of position, to the detriment of

the loser.

But I have not done; Williams are as plentiful as blackberries. There

is an eighth, the Abbot of Eskille, who no more liked to play sub-prior

to a superior than Garrick liked to play an unapplauded Falconbridge

to Sheridan’s King John. William of Eskille was a great reformer of

slothful convents, by whose inmates he was as much detested as an honest

and vigilant foreman is by operatives who work by the day. One thing

deemed worthy of mention by his biographers consists in the dreary fact

that he wore the same shirt for thirty years. At the end of that time

he turned it, and then piously blessed the saints for “the comfort

of clean linen.” I question if even modern tailors have succeeded in

attaining to this extent of saintly uncleanliness, but I would not be

too certain of that fact. As for what they may further have derived from

this excellent person, it is well known that for an abbot to be called

an _Abbot d’Eskille_ was the highest possible compliment that could be

paid him; and so the phrase fell to other _camaraderies_, and a _Tailleur

d’Eskille_ was the origin of a tailor of skill. But this is confidential,

reader,—between you and me. If you are related to an etymologist, or on

friendly terms with a lexicographer, I earnestly beg that you will not

mention it, even “after dinner.”

Under the mystic number “nine,” I come to that William Archbishop of

York, who was the nephew of Stephen King of England, and whom old St.

Bernard belaboured with as many hard words as ever Sir Richard Birnie

hurled, on a Monday morning, on ex-inebriated tailors captured on the

preceding Saturday night. I do not believe a word of what the irate St.

Bernard says against St. William, whom he accuses of the most horrible

crimes. The slightest charge in the bill of indictment drawn up by him,

whom Hurden calls a wicked old impostor, is love of good living. St.

William, like honest Archiepiscopus Wilfred, had a tender inclination for

roast goose! Oh, benedicte Gulielme! may you have found the bird ever as

your inclination,—tender! The sacred goose is an appanage of the tailors,

and it dates from that jovial St. William whom St. Bernard hated as

cordially as though the former had made the latter’s hair-shirt too tight

to comfortably breathe in after supper.

Our tenth example is the St. William who was bishop of St. Brieux, in

Brittany, who often pawned his robes to purchase corn for the poor.

Here we see whence the society of tailors borrow their authority for

depositing pledges, in order to purchase distillations from corn, and for

the poor also,—their poor selves. This is highly satisfactory.

There was one more William, namely, he who, English by birth, was the

introducer of Christianity into Denmark, and who was of such good repute

when living that he was buried in the mausoleum of the Danish kings, at

Roeskild, after death. It was remarked of him that when he was reproving

“drunken Denmark,” he invariably held his pastoral staff as though he

were taking measure, as he probably was of the royal bad habits; and

perhaps on this account he has come in for a share of the patronage

exercised over the guild whose members take measure of men.

And now let it be observed, that although I have mentioned eleven

Williams, there are only _nine_ of them who really rank among the

canonized saints. Is not _that_ suggestive? The fraternity, of whom it

takes nine members to make a man, have naturally supposed that it would

take nine saints to make one patron. It is clear, then, that it is not

to _one_ William, but to _nine_ combined, that the guild address, or did

in olden times address, their vows and acknowledgments; and exactly for

the reason that there are nine Saint Williams have the English tailors

chosen them, in a mass, for their one consolidated patron. _Quod erat

demonstrandum!_

And now, having seen how the tailors took their patron, let us consider

them generally. There have been many of note, either of themselves or in

their sons. Church, bar, army, navy, poetry, and the stage,—they have by

turns excelled in all.

If Barrow rose from his father’s shop, where he was early initiated in

the mysteries of mercer and draper, to wear his well-earned dignity in

the Church, there was nothing wonderful in the elevation. The father

of our present Archbishop of York kept, at Cambridge, a shop like that

of Barrow’s father. One of the most active and useful of the Yorkshire

rectors was himself in early life of the craft; and there is no more

zealous or efficient missionary in Ireland than the Rev. Mr. Doudney, the

brother of the well-known London tailor of that name.

In the olden times,—that is, some two centuries ago,—the boy who passed

from his father’s shop-board to enter, as a man, the pulpit, was of very

High Church principles, if we may take Shadwell’s portrait of Smirk in

the ‘Lancashire Witches’ as a faithful portraiture. Smirk is a little

given, as Brother Ignatius advises all Roman Catholic servants in

Protestant families to be, to inquire into the family secrets, for which

his patron, Sir Edward Harfort, to whom he is chaplain, reproves him. The

following sharp dialogue then ensues:—

“_Smirk._ Consider, Sir, the dignity of my function.

_Sir Ed._ Your father is my tailor. You are _my servant_;

And do you think a cassock and a girdle

Can alter you so much as to enable

You (who before were but a coxcomb, Sir)

To teach me?

_Smirk._ My orders give me authority to speak.

A power legantine I have from Heaven.

_Sir Ed._ _Show your credentials._

The indiscretion of such paltry fellows

Are scandals to the Church and cause they preach for.

With furious zeal you press for discipline,

With fire and blood maintain your great Diana,

Foam at the mouth when a Dissenter’s named,

And damn them if they do not love a surplice.

_Smirk._ Had I the power I’d make them wear pitcht surplices.

_Sir Ed._ Such firebrands as you but hurt the cause.

The learned’st and the wisest of your tribe

Strive by good life and meekness to o’ercome them.”

It is worth recording that this rather high-toned chaplain Smirk, son

of Smirk the Tailor, came under the censure and the scissors of the

scrupulous Master of the Revels. This delicate official could tolerate

the Smirks of Etherege, but when Shadwell exhibited one with something

like sincerity dragging after his faults, the whole town, ay, and the

court too, cried out _shame_! The wisdom of our ancestors does not appear

to match with the assurance which affects to give warranty of it.

To turn from poetry to prose, I have to remark that Ingulph, the Abbot of

Croyland, who wrote the pleasant story of his monastery, appears to me to

have been (possibly) a tailor’s son. The good old man does not indeed say

as much, but he intimates that he was a cockney of humble origin; and, if

“vous êtes orfèvre, Monsieur Josse,” have a significance, why something

of the same sort may be detected in the phrases and, I may add, in the

deeds of the Chronicler of Croyland.

Ingulph was a Westminster boy and an Oxford scholar. Speaking of his

studies at the latter place, he says:—“After I had made progress beyond

most of my fellows in mastering Aristotle, I also _clothed myself down

to the heels_ with the first and second rhetoric of Tully. On growing

to be a young man, I loathed the narrow means of my parents, and daily

longed with the most ardent desire to leave my paternal home, and sighed

for the palaces of kings and princes, to clothe myself in soft or pompous

raiment.” If Molière’s Monsieur Josse was discovered to be a goldsmith by

the setting of his criticism, we may say that Ingulph was of a tailorish

origin by the cut of his phrases. And so, as I have said, of his acts: in

these there is a strong _redolence_ of what the vulgar call “cabbage.”

For instance, when “trustworthy reports” were made by local valuers of

land and property, in order that the same should be taxed, and the said

valuers visited Croyland to that intent, Ingulph thus exultingly records

what took place:—“Those persons showed a kind and benevolent feeling

towards our monastery, and _did not value the monastery at its true

revenue_, nor yet _at its exact extent_; and thus, in their compassion,

took due precautions against the future exactions of the kings, as well

as other burdens, and with the most attentive benevolence made provision

for our welfare.” It is curious to see how robbing the king’s exchequer

in favour of a monastery is called attentive benevolence; how fraudulent

returns are spoken of as “trustworthy reports;” and how the Lord Abbot of

Croyland, the personal favourite of William the Conqueror, cheated the

master who confided in him, and practically illustrated the text, “Render

unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.”

Till a very recent period it was the invariable custom, whenever a

Frenchman appeared on our stage, to represent him ridiculously attired.

This was originally done out of revenge for an affront put upon us by

Catherine de’ Medici; who, instigated by the Duc de Guise, had dressed up

her buffoons at a court entertainment, and called them English _milords_.

Elizabeth made a capital remark when she was told of this insult. She

called aloud, in full court, to the French Ambassador, that when these

French buffoons were declared in presence of her own Ambassador, Lord

North, to be English noblemen, that envoy ought to have told those who

witnessed the unseemly entertainment, that the tailors of France who had

so mimicked the costume of her great sire Henry VIII. should have better

remembered the habiliments of that great King, since he had crossed the

sea more than once with warlike engines displayed, and had some concern

with the people there.

The most fortunate, perhaps I ought to say the most successful, tailor

of very recent times, was Mr. Brunskill, whose seat of operations

was at Exeter. No provincial, and not above one metropolitan, tailor

ever realized such a fortune as he did: it was realized not by luck,

but by labour. For the first seven years that he was in business on

his own account he worked seventeen hours a day. And if he went to

church on Sundays, he plied his needle none the less actively during

the other hours of that day. This is the worst feature in the case;

but he probably entertained a religious respect for that maxim of St.

Augustine which tells us, “qui laborat, orat.” It was his boast that he

was the only man in Exeter who could ride forty miles a day and cut out

work for forty journeymen besides. This assiduity had its reward, and

Brunskill’s business soon returned above £25,000 annually. Of course

young heirs and youths rich only in present hopes resorted to him for

loans; and Brunskill was as successful as a money-broker as he was in

his other vocation. Cent. upon cent. reared the structure of his edifice

of fortune; and long before a quarter of a century had elapsed since he

commenced his career, he was proprietor of Polsloe Park, and, if not a

’squire himself, training his three lads to take station with ’squires.

In the meantime, constant labour was his dear delight, and he was ever at

his board or his bank, making men by a double process,—some, by dressing

their persons; some, by dressing their credit,—and, in either case, with

good security for prompt payment. He was thus hard at work up to one

Monday night not many months ago, and on the following Thursday morning

he was a dead man. Corporal Trim himself might here have found a theme

whereon to deeply philosophize. Leaving that profitable occupation to our

old friend the Corporal, let us look at the half pleasant, half stern

realities of the case. Brunskill left three sons: to the two younger he

bequeathed £10,000 apiece; to the eldest, £200,000 and Polsloe Park. The

younger may wear their crape with satisfaction, and the eldest heir may

bless the needle which pricked him out so pretty a condition. His sire

has made him first gentleman of a future race of county ’squires; and I

beg to assure heirs to come in after times from this peculiar source,

that they will have less to be ashamed of than have those noble gentlemen

and ladies who descend from concubines of kings, and who exist upon the

wages of their first mother’s pollution.

We have now considered both the patron and his flock; let us now see how

the latter have been treated by the lively poets who have “fine-drawn”

them in immortal verse.

THE TAILORS MEASURED BY THE POETS.

“Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori.”—HORACE.

Oh, Thersites, good friend, how scurvily hast thou been dealt with at the

hands of man! Thou art emphatically _un homme incompris_, but thou art

not therefore _un homme méprisable_. The poets have comprehended thee

better than the people; and Homer himself has no desire to prove thee

the coward and boaster for which thou art taken by the world on Homeric

authority. I think that Ulysses, with whom, in the ‘Iliad,’ Thersites

is brought in contact, is by far the greater brute of the two. The

husband of Penelope is cringing to the great, and cruel to the lowly. He

appears much less fitted for a king than for a Poor-law Commissioner.

He unmercifully smites the deformed Thersites with his sceptre; but

why?—because the latter, so far from being a coward, had had the courage

to attack Agamemnon himself before the whole assembled Greeks. He is

ridiculed for the tears extorted from him by pain and shame; and yet

weeping, among the heroes of Greek epic and tragic poetry, is indulged

in on all occasions by the bravest of the brave. There is nothing that

these copper-captains do more readily or more frequently, except lying,

for which they exhibit an alacrity that is perfectly astounding. The soft

infection will run through two whole armies, and then the universal,

solemn shower rises into the majesty of poetry; but when our poor,

ill-treated friend drops a scalding tear, in his own solitary person, it

is then _bathos_! I concede that he talked too much; but it was generally

close to the purpose, and fearless of results. His last act was one

of courage. The semi-deified bully Achilles, having slain Penthesilea,

cried like a school-boy at his self-inflicted loss; and Thersites,

having laughed at him for his folly, paid for his bold presumption with

his life. There is another version of his death, which says that, the

invincible son of Thetis having visited the dead body of the Amazon

with unnatural atrocities, the decent Thersites reproached him for his

unmanly conduct, and was slain by him in rage at the well-merited rebuke.

Shakspeare, who did all things perfectly, makes of Thersites a bold and

witty jester, who entertains a good measure of scorn for the valiant

ignorance of Achilles. The wit of the latter, with that of his brother

chiefs, lies in their sinews; and their talk is of such a skim-milk

complexion that we are ready to exclaim, with bold Thersites himself, “I

will see you hanged like clotpoles ere I come any more to your tents; I

will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of fools.”

As it has been with our poor friend Thersites, so has it been with our

useful friends whose faculties are ever given to a consideration of the

important matter “De Re Vestiariâ.” The poets however do not partake of

the popular fallacy; and the builders of lofty rhyme are not unjust, as

we shall see, to a race whose mission it is to take measures in order to

save godlike man from looking ridiculous.

Shakspeare of course has rendered this full justice to the tailor. In

his illustrations we see our ancient friend variously depicted, as

industrious, intelligent, honest, and full of courage, without vapouring.

The tailor in ‘King John’ is represented as the retailer of news, and the

strong handicraftsman listens with respect to the budget of the weakly

intelligencer.

“I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,

The while his iron did on the anvil cool,

With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;

Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,

Standing on slippers (which his nimble haste

Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet),

Told of a many thousand warlike French

That were embattlèd and rank’d in Kent.”

It is clear that nothing less than an invasion had driven this

hard-working artisan from his shop-board to talk of politics and perils

with his friend at the smithy. The German poet Heyne has something of a

similar description of the tailor, in prose: in his ‘Reisebilder’ there

is an admirably graphic account of how the Elector John William fled

from Düsseldorf, and left his _ci-devant_ subjects to render allegiance

to Murat, the grand and well-curled Duke of Berg; and how, of the

proclamations posted in the night, the earliest readers in the grey

morning were an old soldier and a valiant tailor, Killian,—the latter

attired as loosely as his predecessor in ‘King John,’ and with the same

patriotic sentimentality in the heart which beat beneath his lightly

burdened ribs.

But, to revert to “Sweet Will,” how modestly dignified, assured, and

self-possessed is the tailor in ‘Katherine and Petruchio!’ The wayward

bridegroom had ridiculed the gown brought home by the “woman’s tailor”

for the wayward bride. He had laughed at the “masking-stuff,” sneered at

the demi-cannon of a sleeve, and profanely pronounced its vandyking (if

that term be here admissible) as

“carved like an apple-tart.

Here’s snip and nip, and cut, and slish and slash,

Like to a censer in a barber’s shop.”

To all which profanity against divine fashion, the tailor modestly

remarks that he had made the gown, as he had been bidden,

“orderly and well,

According to the fashion and the time.”

And when Petruchio, who is not half so much of a gentleman in this scene

as Sartorius, calls the latter “thimble,” “flea,” “skein of thread,”

“remnant,” and flings at him a whole vocabulary of vituperation, the

gentle _schneider_ still simply asserts that the gown was made according

to direction, and that the latter came from Grumio himself. Now Grumio,

being a household servant, lies according to the manner of his vocation;

and where he does not lie, he equivocates most basely; and where he

neither lies nor equivocates, he bullies; and finally, he falls into

an argument, which has not the logical conclusion of annihilating his

adversary. The latter, with quiet triumph, produces Grumio’s note

containing the order; but it costs the valet no breath, and as little

hesitation, to pronounce the note a liar too. But a worm will turn; and

the tailor, touched to the quick on a point of honour, brings his bold

heart upon his lips, and valiantly declares, “This is true that I say; an

I had thee in place where, thou shouldst know it;” and thereupon Grumio

falls into bravado and uncleanness, and the tailor is finally dismissed

with scant courtesy, and the very poor security of Hortensio’s promise to

pay for what Petruchio owed. The breach of contract was flagrant, and the

only honest man in the party was the tailor.

So much for honesty; as for bravery, commend me to forcible Francis

Feeble. He too was but a “woman’s tailor;” but what an heroic soul was

in that transparent frame! He reminds me of Sir Charles Napier. When

the latter hero was complimented by the Mayor of Portsmouth, he simply

undertook to do his best, and counselled his worship not to expect too

much. Sir Charles must have taken the idea of his speech from Francis

Feeble; and what an honour is that for the entire profession, not of

sailors, but of tailors! “Wilt thou make me,” asks Falstaff, “as many

holes in an enemy’s battle, as thou hast done in a woman’s petticoat?”

“I will do my good will, Sir,” answereth gallant Feeble, adding, with

true conclusiveness, “you can have no more.” Well might Sir John

enthusiastically hail him as “courageous Feeble,” and compare his

valour to that of the wrathful dove and most magnanimous mouse,—two

animals gentle by nature, but being worked upon not void of spirit.

Indeed, Feeble is the only gallant man of the entire squad of famished

recruits. Bullcalf offers “good master corporate Bardolph” a bribe

of “four Harry ten shillings in French crowns,” to be let off. Not

that Bullcalf is afraid! Not he, the knave; he simply does not care

to go! He is not curious in things strategic; he seeth no attraction

in stricken fields; but he would fain be out of harm’s way, because,

in his own words,—“because I am unwilling, and, for mine own part,

have a desire to stay with my friends; else, Sir, I did not care, for

mine own part, so much.” To no such craven tune runneth the song of

stupendous Feeble! Mouldy urges affection for his old dame as ground

of exemption from running the risk of getting decorated with a bloody

coxcomb. No such jeremiade is chanted by Titanic Francis. “By my troth,”

gallantly swears that lion-like soul,—“by my troth, _I_ care not!” _He_,

the tailor, cares not! neither subterfuge, lie, nor excuse will _he_

condescend to! Moreover, he is not only courageous, but Christian-like

and philosophical; as, for example:—“A man can die but once;—we owe God

a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind; an it be my destiny, so; an it be

not, so; no man’s too good to serve his prince; and, let it go which way

it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.” This was not a

man to march with whom through Coventry a captain need to be ashamed. So

valiant, and yet so modest! So conscious of peril, and yet so bold in the

encountering of it! So clear in his logic, so profound in his philosophy,

so loyal of heart, and so prepared in the latter to entertain any fate,

whatever might be its aspect, or the hour of its coming! Surely, if the

prompter’s book be correct, the _exit_ of this tailor must be directed

to be marked with music, to the air of ‘_A man’s a man for a’ that_.’

Anything less appropriate would fail to do justice to the situation.

In Francis Feeble then the spirit of the tailor is immortalized. Compared

with him, Starveling, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ is simply

tender-hearted. He is one of the actors in the play of ‘Pyramus and

Thisbe,’ and he is the most ready to second the motion that the sword

of Pyramus should not be drawn, nor the lion be permitted to roar, lest

the ladies, dear souls, should be affrighted. Starveling is more of the

carpet knight than Feeble. The one is gallant in stricken fields, the

other airs his gallantry in ladies’ bower.

It was right that the race of Feebles should not expire. It was said

of old, that to be the sire of sons was no great achievement, but that

he was a man indeed who was the father of daughters. Such no doubt was

Feeble, one of whose spirited girls married a Sketon; and their eldest

son it is, as I would fondly think, who figures so bravely among the

followers of Perkin Warbeck, in John Ford’s tragedy of that name. Sketon

is the most daring of the company, and the blood of the Feebles suffers

no disgrace in his person. Sketon, like the great Duke of Guise, is

full of dashing hope, when all his fellows are sunk in dull despair.

While so august a personage as John à Water, Mayor of Cork, is thinking

twice ere he acts once, Sketon thus boldly and tailor-like cuts out the

habit of invasion, and prepares the garb of victory:—“’Tis but going

to sea, and leaping ashore,” saith he; “cut ten or twelve thousand

unnecessary throats, fire seven or eight towns, take half-a-dozen cities,

get him into the market-place, crown him Richard the Fourth, and the

business is finished!” Is not this a man whom Nature intended for a

commander-in-chief? He is not only quick of resolution, but of action;

and yet, I dare be sworn, Sketon had read nothing of what Caius Crispus

Sallust says thereupon. And I beseech you to mark one thing more. You

know that when the foolish Roman Emperor would not permit the statue of

Brutus to be borne in the funeral procession of Britannicus, lest the

people should think too much upon that imperatoricide, the obstinate and

vulgar rogues thought all the more upon him and his deeds, for the very

reason that his statue did not figure among those of other heroes. So

in the above heart-stirring speech of valiant Sketon, we miss something

which reveals to us how chaste and chivalrous a soldier was the grandson

of Feeble. His views go to bold invasion, to the burning of towns, and

the sacking of cities, and to splendid victory, built upon the cutting

of throats, which he nicely, and as it were apologetically for the act,

describes as “_unnecessary_ throats.” A taste of the quality of the

roystering soldier is perhaps to be found in this speech; but you are

entreated to remark, that all the vengeance of the tailor is directed

solely against his enemy, _man_. The women, it is evident, have nothing

to fear at the hands of Sketon. He does not mention rudeness to them,

just as the ancient legislator did not provide against parricide, simply

because, judging from his own heart, he deemed the crime impossible.

Sketon and Scipio deserve to go down to posterity hand in hand, as

respecters of timid beauty. There was a Persian victor, too, who would

not look upon the faces of his fair captives, lest he should be tempted

to violate the principles of propriety. Sketon was bolder, and not less

virtuous. To my thinking, he is the Bayard of tailors. It would wrong him

to compare him even with Joseph Andrews; and I will only add that if old

Tilly, at Magdeburg, had been influenced by the virtue of Sketon, there

might not have been less weeping for lost lovers, but there would have

been more maidens left to sit down in cypress, and mourn for them.

Sketon, foremost in fight, is first to hail the man whom he takes for

prince, when victory has induced the Cornish men of mettle to proclaim

at Bodnam, Richard IV. “monarch of England, and king of hearts.” Jubilant

in success, he does not complain when Fortune veils her face. Defeat and

captivity are accepted with dignity when they are compelled upon him;

and when swift death is to be the doom of himself and companions, he

does not object to the philosophical disquisition of his old leader and

fellow-sufferer, Perkin, that death by the sword, whereby the “pain is

past ere sensibly ’tis felt,” is far preferable to being slowly slain at

home by the doctors. For he says:—

“To tumble

From bed to bed, be massacred alive

By some physicians, for a month or two,

In hope of freedom from a fever’s torments,

Might stagger manhood.”

And accordingly Sketon follows Warbeck to death without a remnant of

fear; and I _must_ add, that Henry VII. showed little generosity when he

remarked upon their executions, as he sat comfortably at home,

“That public states,

As our particular bodies, taste most good

In health, when purged of corrupted blood.”

Ford, the dramatic poet, offers indirect testimony to the morality of the

English tailor, by his introduction of a French member of the fraternity

in ‘The Sun’s Darling.’ The author calls his piece a moral masque; but

Monsieur le Tailleur utters some very immoral matter in it, such, it may

fairly be supposed, as he could not have put into the mouth of a kinsman

of Starveling.

Massinger’s tailors again show that they were as much the victims of

their customers as their descendants are now; and the “Who suffers?”—the

facetious query of Mr. Pierce Egan’s ‘Tom and Jerry,’—would have been

quite as appropriate a way of asking the name of a “Corinthian’s” tailor

two centuries ago. “I am bound t’ye, gentlemen,” says the grateful

builder of doublets and trunkhose to his lordly customers. “You are

deceived,” is the comment of the page; “_they’ll_ be bound to you; you

must remember to trust them none.” The scene here, it is true, is in

Dijon; but Massinger, like Plautus, portrayed his country’s manner in

scenes and personages drawn from other climes. This is easily to be

discerned in the former author’s play of ‘The Old Law.’ The scene is laid

in Epirus. A tailor waits upon the young Simonides, who has just joyfully

inherited the paternal estate; but the youthful courtier despises the

operative employed by his sire.

“Thou mad’st my father’s clothes,”

he says.—

“That I confess.

But what son and heir will have his father’s tailor,

Unless he have a mind to be well laugh’d at?

Thou hast been so used to wide long-side things, that, when

I come to truss, I shall have the waist of my doublet

Lie on my buttocks;—a sweet sight!”

This is purely descriptive, not of Epirote, but of old English costume.

The former never changed; our fashions have constantly varied; and the

very long-waisted doublet scorned by Simonides, who talks like the rakish

heir of an old Cheapside drysalter, has descended from the saloon to the

stables. It was once worn by lords; it is now carried by grooms.

But perhaps, on the question of fashions, the remark of the simple-minded

tailor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Fair Maid of the Inn,’ who is duped

so consumedly by Ferabosco the mountebank, is very apt to the matter.

He has travelled, and is willing even to go to the moon, in search of

strange and exquisite new fashions; but, as he says, “all we can see or

invent are but old ones with new names to ’em.” The poets I have last

mentioned exhibit quite as great a contempt for chronology as any of

their harmonious fellows. Thus, Blacksnout, the Roman blacksmith, in the

‘Faithful Friends,’ living when Titus Martius was King of Rome, tells

Snipsnap, the Latin tailor, that he had not only been in battle, but had

been shot “with a bullet as big as a penny loaf;” he adds, with much

circumstance:—

“’Twas at the siege of Bunnill, passing the straits

’Twixt Mayor’s-lane and Tierra del Fuego,

The fiery isle!”

Snipsnap is the tailor of the poets’ own period. He calls for drink

with the airy freedom of a be-plumed gallant, pays magnanimously, as

be-plumed gallants did _not_, cuts jokes like a court-jester, and boasts

that he can “finish more suits in a year than any two lawyers in the

town.” Blacksnout’s remark in reply, that “lawyers and tailors have their

several hells,” is rather complimentary than otherwise to the last-named

gentle craft; for it places the tailor, who exercises the time-honoured

observance of “cabbage,” on a level with the lawyer, who purchases his

luxuries through the process of partially stripping his clients. The

“hell” here named is supposed to be the place wherein both lawyers and

tailors put those shreds, of which Lisauro speaks in the ‘Maid in the

Mill:’—

“The shreds of what he steals from us, believe it,

Make him a mighty man.”

Ben Jonson alludes to this particular locality in ‘The Staple of

News.’ Fashioner waiting past the appointed time upon Pennyboy, Jun.,

compensates for his dilatoriness by perpetrating a witticism, and the

young gentleman remarks thereupon:—

“That jest

Has gain’d thy pardon; thou hadst lived condemn’d

To thine own hell else.”

Fashioner was like Mr. Joy, the Cambridge tailor of an olden time. If

that hilarious craftsman had promised a suit to be ready for a ball, and

did not bring it home till the next morning at breakfast, his stereotyped

phrase ever took the form of—“Sorrow endureth for a night, but ‘Joy’

cometh with the morning!” But, to return to the _hades_ of tailors.

The reader will doubtless remember that Ralph, the doughty squire of

Hudibras, had been originally of the following of the needle, and—

“An equal stock of wit and valour

He had laid in, by birth a tailor.”

Ralph dated his ancestry from the immediate heir of Dido, from whom

“descended _cross-legg’d knights_,

Famed for their faith.”

And then are we told, with rich Hudibrastic humour, that Ralph, the

ex-tailor, was like Æneas the Pious, for—

“This sturdy squire, he had, as well

As the bold Trojan knight, seen _hell_;”

which locality, as connected with the handicraftsman, is described as

being the place where tailors deposit their perquisites.

We have digressed a little from Snipsnap, the English tailor, whom

Beaumont and Fletcher have placed with other thoroughly English artisans

in the piece already named, ‘The Faithful Friends.’ Snipsnap holds his

profession to be above that of a soldier, but yet modestly excuses

himself from fighting, on the score that, although a tailor, he is _not_

a gentleman. Being provoked, however, he knocks down the rude offender,

and has a thorough contempt for the constable,—a contempt in the

entertaining of which he is so well justified by the logical remark of

Blacksnout:—

“A constable’s

An ass. I’ve been a constable myself.”

The bravery of Snipsnap is a true bravery: he is conscious of the peril

in which he stands as a soldier, and, ere going into action, bethinks

him of old prophecies that he should be slain; but when he pictures to

himself the public scorn that ever follows cowardice, and that, if he and

his fellows be poltroons, every wench in Rome will fling dirt at them as

they pass by, saying, “There are the soldiers who durst not draw their

blades,” then is the heroic soul fired, and Snipsnap exclaims:—

“But they shall find we dare, and strike home too:

I am now resolved, and will be valiant;

This bodkin quilts their skin as full of holes

As e’er was canvas doublet.”

“Spoke like a bold man, Snip!” says Bellario, the old soldier. Ay, and

like a discreet and thinking man. There is no foolhardiness and rash

action in Snipsnap; but, like the greatest of heroes, he looks his peril

calmly in the face, and then encounters it with a gallantry that is not

to be resisted.

And it is to be observed that the tailors of the poets are as generous

as they are brave. Witness Vertigo in ‘The Maid in the Mill;’ the lords

among whom he stands owe him money, and yet affect to have forgotten his

name. One of them ventures, indeed, to hope that he has not come to press

his claims; and what says this very pearl and quintessence of tailors?

“Good faith, the least thought in my heart; your love, gentlemen,

Your love’s enough for me. Money? hang money!

Let me preserve your love!”

Incomparable Vertigo! What a trade might he drive in London upon those

terms! A waistcoat for a good opinion, a fashionable coat for esteem, and

a full-dress suit to be paid for with the wearer’s love, in a promissory

note made payable at sight!

Vertigo understands the dignity of his profession; indeed, he wears a

double dignity, for he is a “woman’s tailor,” as well as “man’s;” and

when he is about to measure Florimel, how bravely does he bid the lords

“stand out o’ th’ light!” How gallantly does he promise the lady when he

swears—or asserts rather (for the tailors of the poets never swear,—that

is, never swear profanely; they are like the nun in Chaucer, whose

prettiest oath was but “by St. Eloy!”)—when he asserts then that she has

“the neatest body in Spain this day;” and further, when Otrante, the

Spanish Count, in love with Florimel, remarks that happily his wardrobe,

with the tailor’s help, may fit her instantly, what self-dignity in the

first line of the reply, and what philosophy in the second!—