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.”