“That I confess. But what son and heir will have his father’s tailor, Unless he have a mind to be well laugh’d at? Thou hast been so used to wide long-side things, that, when I come to truss, I shall have the waist of my doublet Lie on my buttocks;—a sweet sight!” This is purely descriptive, not of Epirote, but of old English costume. The former never changed; our fashions have constantly varied; and the very long-waisted doublet scorned by Simonides, who talks like the rakish heir of an old Cheapside drysalter, has descended from the saloon to the stables. It was once worn by lords; it is now carried by grooms. But perhaps, on the question of fashions, the remark of the simple-minded tailor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Fair Maid of the Inn,’ who is duped so consumedly by Ferabosco the mountebank, is very apt to the matter. He has travelled, and is willing even to go to the moon, in search of strange and exquisite new fashions; but, as he says, “all we can see or invent are but old ones with new names to ’em.” The poets I have last mentioned exhibit quite as great a contempt for chronology as any of their harmonious fellows. Thus, Blacksnout, the Roman blacksmith, in the ‘Faithful Friends,’ living when Titus Martius was King of Rome, tells Snipsnap, the Latin tailor, that he had not only been in battle, but had been shot “with a bullet as big as a penny loaf;” he adds, with much circumstance:— “’Twas at the siege of Bunnill, passing the straits ’Twixt Mayor’s-lane and Tierra del Fuego, The fiery isle!” Snipsnap is the tailor of the poets’ own period. He calls for drink with the airy freedom of a be-plumed gallant, pays magnanimously, as be-plumed gallants did _not_, cuts jokes like a court-jester, and boasts that he can “finish more suits in a year than any two lawyers in the town.” Blacksnout’s remark in reply, that “lawyers and tailors have their several hells,” is rather complimentary than otherwise to the last-named gentle craft; for it places the tailor, who exercises the time-honoured observance of “cabbage,” on a level with the lawyer, who purchases his luxuries through the process of partially stripping his clients. The “hell” here named is supposed to be the place wherein both lawyers and tailors put those shreds, of which Lisauro speaks in the ‘Maid in the Mill:’— “The shreds of what he steals from us, believe it, Make him a mighty man.” Ben Jonson alludes to this particular locality in ‘The Staple of News.’ Fashioner waiting past the appointed time upon Pennyboy, Jun., compensates for his dilatoriness by perpetrating a witticism, and the young gentleman remarks thereupon:— “That jest Has gain’d thy pardon; thou hadst lived condemn’d To thine own hell else.”