It may be said (and I hope without profanity) that sewing came in with sin; or rather, it was one of the first consequences of the first crime. Perhaps, for this reason, has a certain degree of contempt been inherited by the professors of the art. The trade of a tailor is not honoured with mention in any part of the Scriptures. Gardening was the early occupation, and hence horticulture is accounted refined. Tubal Cain was the first worker in iron; and from his time down to a very late period, the employment which required much exercise of muscular strength had the precedence of mere sedentary callings. The French, indeed, as becomes a nation which prides itself as being the most particular touching the external dressing of a man, has always confessed to a sort of tender regard for the tailor. The vocation against which Gallic wits direct their light-winged shafts, is that of the grocer. The _épicier_ with them is a man whose soul does not rise above _lait de poule_ and cotton nightcaps. He is generally the coward in farces, while heroism is not made separable from the melancholy wielders of the needle. In France however we may still trace a remnant of the time when the highest honour was awarded to the pliers of the heaviest tools, or the workmen whose vocation had a spice of peril in it. Thus the farrier smith, in France, still enjoys a courtesy rank which places him on a nominal equality with the tried commanders of valiant hosts; and if Soult was Marshal of France, so every Gallic farrier is “_maréchal ferrant_”—the marshal of the workers in iron. As weavers and fullers are noticed in Holy Writ, while the tailor is passed over in silence, it is probable that he had no distinct status among the Jews, and that, during a long period at least, every man was his own _costumier_. In other countries the tailor and the physician were both slaves, and probably the first was as little or less of a bungler than the second; for the _servus vestiarius_ could often improve the outer man, when the _servus medicus_ could not do as much for the inner one.