——That persons of quality and fortune distinguished themselves by the fineness and whiteness of their clothes; which colour (next to purple, which was appropriated to the great offices) they most affected, and wore on their birth-days and public rejoicings.——That it appeared from the best historians of those times, that they frequently sent their clothes to the fuller, to be clean’d and whitened:——but that the inferior people, to avoid that expence, generally wore brown clothes, and of a something coarser texture,—till towards the beginning of _Augustus_’s reign, when the slave dressed like his master, and almost every distinction of habiliment was lost, but the _Latus Clavus._ And what was the _Latus Clavus?_ said my father. _Rubenius_ told him, that the point was still litigating amongst the learned:——That _Egnatius, Sigonius, Bossius Ticinensis, Bayfius Budæus, Salmasius, Lipsius, Lazius, Isaac Casaubon_, and _Joseph Scaliger_, all differed from each other,—and he from them: That some took it to be the button,—some the coat itself,—others only the colour of it;—That the great _Bayfuis_ in his Wardrobe of the Ancients, chap. 12—honestly said, he knew not what it was,—whether a tibula,—a stud,—a button,—a loop,—a buckle,—or clasps and keepers.—— ——My father lost the horse, but not the saddle——They are _hooks and eyes_, said my father——and with hooks and eyes he ordered my breeches to be made. C H A P. LXIII WE are now going to enter upon a new scene of events.—— ——Leave we then the breeches in the taylor’s hands, with my father standing over him with his cane, reading him as he sat at work a lecture upon the _latus clavus_, and pointing to the precise part of the waistband, where he was determined to have it sewed on.—— Leave we my mother—(truest of all the _Poco-curante_’s of her sex!)—careless about it, as about every thing else in the world which concerned her;—that is,—indifferent whether it was done this way or that,——provided it was but done at all.—— Leave we _Slop_ likewise to the full profits of all my dishonours.—— Leave we poor _Le Fever_ to recover, and get home from _Marseilles_ as he can.——And last of all,—because the hardest of all—— Let us leave, if possible, _myself:_——But ’tis impossible,—I must go along with you to the end of the work. C H A P. LXIV IF the reader has not a clear conception of the rood and the half of ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle _Toby_’s kitchen-garden, and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours,—the fault is not in me,—but in his imagination;—for I am sure I gave him so minute a description, I was almost ashamed of it.