is betrayed by his wife; and the chief Flint wins admiration, because he gets hanged and is cheated out of his mistress. The strike ends unfavourably for those who make it; but though the author sets out with the determination to render all his _dramatis personæ_ ridiculous, he cannot do it. He is like the prophet who was compelled to vaticinate against his inclinations; and the deity of dramatic poetry and tailors compels him to reverence where he would fain have committed desecration. The very first sentence in this play contains an allusion to Elliott’s brigade, that famous band of warriors made up almost entirely of tailors. I must refer my readers to the piece itself, if they be curious to see how the subject is treated in evident contrariety to the author’s own design; he makes all the characters utter commonplace common sense, when his intention was to make them lose themselves upon stilts in a sea of tropes, tirades, and thunderings against tyranny. The antiquarian will not fail to notice that Bedfordbury is a locality set down in this piece as a place where tailors’ men did congregate some century ago. They still much do congregate on the same spot. A century before the period of the piece, Frank Kynaston, the poet, resided in a house adjacent to the “Bury,” and the memory thereof is still kept up in the name Kynaston-alley, which is within that same “Bury” of classical associations. Thus do tailoring and the _belles lettres_ continue to be in close connection; and where Kynaston’s muse kept itself warm, the sacred goose of the _schneider_ still glows with fervid heat. The operatives of the “Bury,” moreover, look as much like poets as tailors,—so abstract are they of air, so romantically heedless of personal appearance, and so unromantically and really “half-starved.” Not of them can be said what Titillinda says of Abrahamides— “Whose form might claim attention even from queens.” Finally: want of space, and not of material, brings that troublesome adverb upon me. If it be objected, that the tailors of the poets _do_ sometimes waver in critical situations, and condescend to tremble in presence of emergency, I have to answer, that such facts prove their heroism, as being akin to that of the Conqueror and Cœur de Lion. When the former was being crowned at York, he heard such an uproar in the streets, caused by the massacre of the inhabitants by the amiable Normans, that he sat upon his throne shaking with affright; “vehementer tremens,” says Orderic Vitalis, and he is very good authority. As for that tinselled bully, Richard, nobody doubts his single virtue—courage; but bold as he was, we all know that when in Sicily, he discreetly ran away from a bumpkin who threatened to cudgel him for attempting a matter of petty larceny. Francis Feeble and his brethren may, therefore, not be ashamed if they have foibles in common with William of Normandy and Richard of Bordeaux.