Tilly, at Magdeburg, had been influenced by the virtue of Sketon, there might not have been less weeping for lost lovers, but there would have been more maidens left to sit down in cypress, and mourn for them. Sketon, foremost in fight, is first to hail the man whom he takes for prince, when victory has induced the Cornish men of mettle to proclaim at Bodnam, Richard IV. “monarch of England, and king of hearts.” Jubilant in success, he does not complain when Fortune veils her face. Defeat and captivity are accepted with dignity when they are compelled upon him; and when swift death is to be the doom of himself and companions, he does not object to the philosophical disquisition of his old leader and fellow-sufferer, Perkin, that death by the sword, whereby the “pain is past ere sensibly ’tis felt,” is far preferable to being slowly slain at home by the doctors. For he says:— “To tumble From bed to bed, be massacred alive By some physicians, for a month or two, In hope of freedom from a fever’s torments, Might stagger manhood.” And accordingly Sketon follows Warbeck to death without a remnant of fear; and I _must_ add, that Henry VII. showed little generosity when he remarked upon their executions, as he sat comfortably at home, “That public states, As our particular bodies, taste most good In health, when purged of corrupted blood.” Ford, the dramatic poet, offers indirect testimony to the morality of the English tailor, by his introduction of a French member of the fraternity in ‘The Sun’s Darling.’ The author calls his piece a moral masque; but Monsieur le Tailleur utters some very immoral matter in it, such, it may fairly be supposed, as he could not have put into the mouth of a kinsman of Starveling. Massinger’s tailors again show that they were as much the victims of their customers as their descendants are now; and the “Who suffers?”—the facetious query of Mr. Pierce Egan’s ‘Tom and Jerry,’—would have been quite as appropriate a way of asking the name of a “Corinthian’s” tailor two centuries ago. “I am bound t’ye, gentlemen,” says the grateful builder of doublets and trunkhose to his lordly customers. “You are deceived,” is the comment of the page; “_they’ll_ be bound to you; you must remember to trust them none.” The scene here, it is true, is in Dijon; but Massinger, like Plautus, portrayed his country’s manner in scenes and personages drawn from other climes. This is easily to be discerned in the former author’s play of ‘The Old Law.’ The scene is laid in Epirus. A tailor waits upon the young Simonides, who has just joyfully inherited the paternal estate; but the youthful courtier despises the operative employed by his sire. “Thou mad’st my father’s clothes,” he says.—