Taking Nick Stuff as a true sample of those of his craft, who formed the exception to the general rule of professional honesty, I must say for such as he, that if he were a knave, it was because for years he had had an evil example before his eyes in the persons of men better off than himself, who had not _his_ plea of small means and long credit as an excuse for bettering his condition at the public cost. If the fashioners of clothes were sometimes not so careful as they might be in the application of the principle of honesty, the makers of the cloth were infinitely worse. _They_ lay under the imputation of being universally fraudulent. We have no better, and need no better, proof on this matter, than what is afforded us by the testimony of good old Latimer, who had a sharp eye to detect vice, and a bold tongue to denounce it. In his third sermon preached before King Edward VI., there is the following graphic passage:—“I hear say that there is a certain cunning come up in the mixing of wares. How say you?—were it not a wonder to hear that clothmakers should become ’pothecaries, yea, and as I hear say, in such a place whereat they have professed the Gospel and the word of God most earnestly of a long time.” And then the preacher, after some animadversions on the devil,—whom he styles in another sermon as the only prelate he knows who is never absent from his diocese, nor idle when in it,—thus proceeds:—“If his cloth be seventeen yards long, he will set it on a rack, and stretch it out with ropes, and rack it till the sinews shrink again, till he hath brought it to eighteen yards. When they have brought it to that perfection, they have a pretty feat to thick it again. He makes me a powder for it, and plays the ’pothecary. They call it flock-powder. They do so incorporate it to the cloth, that it is wonderful to consider. Truly, a good invention! Oh that so goodly wits should be so ill applied! they may well deceive the people, but they cannot deceive God. They were wont to make beds of flock, and it was a good bed, too; now they have turned the flock into powder, to play the false thieves with it. These mixtures come of covetousness. They are plain theft.” From this singular passage it is apparent that what is popularly known at Manchester as “devil’s dust,” was an invention which the cotton lords of today have inherited from their fathers in Mammon, the cloth lords of some three centuries ago. That ever-active prelate, the devil, is therefore as busily engaged in his diocese now as he was in the days whose doings are condemned by Latimer. In some respects however there is improvement, if we may believe the assertion made by Mr. Thackeray, in his ‘Essays on the Essayists,’ to the effect that even hermits out at elbows would lose their respectability now if they were to attempt to cheat their tailors. Other men succeed in doing so, without forfeiting the privilege conceded by Mark Antony to Brutus of being “an honourable man.”