"Ask Mamma"; or, The Richest Commoner In EnglandSurtees, Robert Smith
General
"Ask Mamma"; or, The Richest Commoner In England
Surtees, Robert Smith
England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Fox hunting -- Fiction
“I cannot tell you vy, sir; but it is not _etiquette_, and I as a
professor of garniture, toggery vot you call, sid lose _caste_
with my comrades if I lived with a me lor vot honted poor puss in
de pink.”
“_Humph!_” grunted Billy, bouncing out of bed, thinking what a
bore it was paying a man for being his master. He then commenced
the operations of the occasion, and with the aid of Monsieur was
presently attired in the dread costume. He then clonk, clonk,
clonked down stairs with his Jersey-patterned spurs, toes well
out to clear the steps, most heartily wishing he was clonking up
again on his return from the hunt.
175m
_Original Size_
Monsieur was right. The Major is in his myrtle-green coat—a coat,
not built after the fashion of the scanty swallow-tailed red in
which he appears at page 65 of this agreeable work, but with the
more liberal allowance of cloth peculiar to the period in which
we live. A loosely hanging garment, and not a strait-waistcoat,
in fact, a fashion very much in favour of bunglers, seeing that
anybody can make a sack, while it takes a tailor to make a coat.
The Major’s cost him about two pounds five, the cloth having been
purchased at a clothier’s and made up at home, by a three
shilling a day man and his meat. We laugh at the ladies for
liking to be cheated by their milliners; but young gentlemen are
quite as accommodating to their tailors. Let any man of forty
look at his tailor’s bill when he was twenty, and see what a
liberality of innocence it displays. And that not only in matters
of taste and fashion, which are the legitimate loopholes of
extortion, but in the sober articles of ordinary requirement. We
saw a once-celebrated west-end tailor’s bill the other day, in
which a plain black coat was made to figure in the following
magniloquent item:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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