So you have got a decent coat on your back, gentle reader! Well, we congratulate you upon this fortunate circumstance, this honourable badge of aesthetic distinction; but do not be too proud of it--there are coats, and coats--_non ex quovis ligno fit Mercurius_, you know. Wait a bit till we turn you round, and trot you out to see the cut of the thing, ere we admit you to be a well-dressed, or even a sensibly-dressed man. But before we enter into controversy on the superficial appearance of man in the nineteenth century, let us hasten to recall attention to our definition of good taste in all matters of dress--utility first and ornament afterwards, but ornament always subservient to utility--and let us also appease the indignation of the tailoring world by affirming, that in one grand class of coats--we will specify which by and by--the public seem to have arrived at a tolerably reasonable result. There certainly are some men, many men indeed, in the world who may be said to be sensibly dressed. 'Tis a phenomenon when you come to think about it; but the fluctuations of taste in this matter have, for the time being, arrived at a normal state. After the variations of centuries, the vagaries of taste in male attire, (which may be measured, for their ups and downs, by curves, with quite as much reason as the rise and fall in prices of corn, and various other things that the members of statistical societies delight in portraying)--these variations, in their endless wrigglings and windings, have come back in more cases than one to their points of departure, and there form _nodi_, points of reflection, contrary flexure, &c. At all these points the curve of taste may be assumed to be stationary. Pray, excuse us, good reader, for being scientific--do not call it obscure--on so luminous a point. But is not the mystery of tailoring become a science? Is not the ninth part of a man now called an _artiste_? Have we not regular treatises published, with no end of diagrams, on the art of self-measurement? Just look at the advertisements at the back of your Sunday newspaper, or in the fly-leaves of your last Maga. And, after all, where is the harm? "The noblest study of mankind is man!" However, it is a learned point, on which a world of talk may be got up; so we will waive it for the moment, to be resumed in the due course of our ruminations.