What a heavy captivity was that!—not so much for the prisoner, as for those who were compelled to listen to the long and dreary and pointless stories of the good-natured and weak old man. When the officers who had this Pope in charge, were conducting him from Rome to Paris, they on one occasion shut him up in a coach-house, where he remained seated in his carriage, while his captors dined. Cardinal Pacca says of this Pope, who was an admirable tailor when necessity pressed him, that, during the eighteen months he was resident at Fontainebleau, he could never be prevailed upon to quit his own suite of apartments. He, and the Cardinals who accompanied him, were employed in conjugating the verb _s’ennuyer_. He loved a little gossip, and hated books; but the captive had a solace—one worthy of the dignity of Diocletian, when he cultivated cabbages. Savary, Duke de Rovigo, who was chief gaoler over the chief Pontiff, says, of the latter, that “he did not open a book the livelong day; and he occupied himself in things which, if I had not myself seen, I never should have believed; stitching and mending, for instance, holes and rents in his clothes, sewing a button on his breeches, and washing with his own hands his dressing-gown, on which he had a habit of allowing his snuff to fall in large quantities.” Savary is especially, and naturally, astonished that the supreme Pontiff preferred his amateur tailoring to enjoying the books in the great library of Fontainebleau. Poor man! he did not like reading, but he did like killing time at the point of the needle. The tailors of his community are doubtless proud of such a patron. The story rests on Savary’s authority; and while Cardinal Pacca abuses him for telling it, his Eminence does not deny its authenticity. * * * * * But we must not allow the Pope and his pursuits to take us away from the consideration of sacred things. Reverting therefore to the Jews, it may be said of them that if they did not possess the tailor as a professor, they had a sufficient variety of dress to perplex the domestic ministers of fashion. There is quite as much perplexity for those who have to write about it. The Jews, like the modern children of the Prophet, would not tolerate the representation of any living figure, and the antiquary has therefore no chance of consulting a Hebrew ‘Journal des Modes.’ The monuments of nations distant from Palestine cannot be accepted as authority when they are said to represent the Jewish people, for we have no assurance that the people _are_ thereon represented; or if they be Jews, that they are, in slavery, wearing a national costume.