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