Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

“L’homme est un animal!” said a French orator, by way of peroration to his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies; “Man is an animal!”—and there he stopped. He found his subject exhausted, and he sat down in confusion. Thereupon his own familiar friend arose, and suggested that it was desirable that the honourable gentleman’s speech should be printed, with a portrait of the author!

The definition is, as far as it goes, a plagiarism from Plato. In the Apophthegmata of Diogenes Laertius, it is stated that Plato defined Man as an animal with two legs and without feathers. The definition having been generally approved of, Diogenes went into the school of the philosopher, carrying with him a cock, which he had stripped of his plumage. “Here,” said he, “is Plato’s man!” Plato saw that his definition needed improvement, and he added to it “with broad nails.” He might have further said, “and needing something in place of feathers.”

So much depends upon this substitute, and so much more is thought of habits than of manners,—that is, morals,—and of the makers of the former than the teachers of the latter, that it is popularly and properly said, “The tailor makes the man.” No doubt of it; and tailors are far better paid than tutors. The Nugees keep country-houses and recline in carriages; the philosophers are accounted of as nugæ, and plod on foot to give golden instruction for small thanks and a few pence. Their device, if they are ever so ennobled as to be thought worthy of one, might be that of the patriotic ladies of Prussia, who, before the time when their country became a satrapy of Muscovy, exchanged their golden adornments for an iron ring, on which was engraved the legend, “Ich gab Gold um Eisen,”—I gave gold for iron.

This being the case, it is little to be wondered at that man is more careful about his dress than his instruction. The well-dressed man looks, at all events, like a man well to do; and how profound is the respect of the world for a man who may be catalogued as “well to do!” That man thoroughly understood the meaning of the term who, when on his trial for murder, and anticipating an acquittal, invited his counsel to dinner. The invitation was accepted, but, the verdict rendering the inviter incapable of even ordering a dinner for himself, the intended guest frowned on the convict, and went and dined with the prosecutor.

Philosophy has done its best to cure man of vanity in dress; but philosophy has been vain,—and so has man. “For a man to be fantastic and effeminate in attire,” says Stobæus, “is unpardonable. It is next to Sardanapalus’s spinning among women. To such I would say, Art thou not ashamed, when Nature hath made thee a man, to make thyself a woman?”

Seneca hath something to the same purpose, and not altogether inapplicable in our days. “Some of the manly sex amongst us,” says he, “are so effeminate, that they would rather have the commonwealth out of order, than their hair; they are more solicitous about trimming and sprucing up their heads, than they are of their health or of the safety of the public; and are more anxious to be fine than virtuous.” Sir Walter Raleigh asserts that “No man is esteemed for gay garments, but by fools and women,”—an assertion which shows that his philosophy and his civility were both in a ragged condition. Sir Matthew Hale throws the blame where it ought to be borne, when he declares that the vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashions, and valuing ourselves by them, is one of the most childish pieces of folly that can be.

The philosophy of the judge is “truer steel” than that of the soldier. But, for philosophy in describing a dress, I know nothing that can surpass that of the poor Irishman, who, looking down at his own garment of million tatters, smilingly said that it was “made of holes.”

There is very good philosophy in the story of Nessus and his tunic. We all know how the story is told in history, and that it therefore cannot be true. Apollodorus and Pausanias, Diodorus, Ovid, and Seneca, have all told the same tale, without guessing at the truth which lies hid in it. It is to this effect:—When Hercules was on his way to the court of Ceyx, king of Trachinia, in company with his “lady,” Dejanira, the travellers came to the swollen river of Evenus. Nessus, the centaur, politely carried the lady over, and became very rude to her on the opposite bank. The stalwart husband, from the other shore, observing what was going on, sent one of his shafts, dipped in the poison of the Lernæan Hydra, right into the centaur’s heart. Nessus, while dying, presented his shirt,—that is, his tunic,—to Dejanira, informing her that if she could persuade Hercules to wear it, he would never behave to her otherwise than as a gentleman. Now, as he never had yet so comported himself—for he was a dreadful bully—Dejanira accepted the gift; and, as the hero was soon after found flirting with his old love Iole, and was vain of his appearance, she sent the gay garment to him, and he had no sooner donned it than death clasped him, and the hero was transferred to where there were so many other powerful rascals,—the halls of Olympus. So much for fiction, and those never-to-be-trusted poets. Here is the truth.

Nessus was a ridiculous old dandy, with a juvenile wig and reprobate principles. He courted Hercules’ “lady,” and so flattered her that she became fonder than ever of fashionable garments, and even accepted a shawl from the centaur, who had ordered it in the name of the husband, and left him to pay for it. Hercules forgot his vexation in the beaux yeux of Iole; and remembering how the “old beast,” as he used to call the centaur, had contrived to sun himself in Dejanira’s eyes, he adopted the fashion of Nessus; and, lightly as nymphs were dressed in the days of Iole, he ran up a right royal bill at the milliner’s, and no more thought of what he should have to pay than the Duke of York, when ordering cashmeres for Anna Maria Clarke. The fall of the year however came, and therewith the “little account,” with an intimation that a speedy settlement would oblige. Hercules, hero as he was, felt his heart fail him as he looked at “the tottle of the whole,” and he fell into such extravagances that, being hunted to death by bailiffs, and his honesty as small as that of the proprietor of an ultra-pietist paper who cheats his editor, he took the benefit of the act, and retired to the country, where he kept a shabby chariot, drawn by only two mangy leopards, and ultimately died, like other heroes, bewailing his amiable weaknesses.

But let us go further back than to mythology, in order to examine the origin of dress.

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.

Under the old dispensation, sewing, as I have said, followed sin; and he who forged a bill-hook or a brand was in higher esteem than he who lived by the exercise of the needle. Under a later dispensation we find examples of this order of precedency being reversed. Lydia of Thyatira was among the first who joined Paul in prayer, by the riverside at Philippi. Her office was to make up into garments the purple cloth for which Lydia itself was famous. With this proselyte Paul dwelt, and on her he left a blessing. It was not so with a certain strong handicraftsman. When Paul was once at the point of death he bethought him of an old vicious adversary, and said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works!” And by this we not only see that he who taught so wisely could sometimes err against his own instructions, but we may even make this strange circumstance profitable to us by viewing in it the proof that even the nearest to heaven are not entirely free from the stains of earth; and that the spirit truly worthy of immortality has never yet been found in aught that was mortal.

And this reminds me, that while every Jew learned some trade, there is none recorded as having learned that of a tailor. The coppersmiths endeavour to disconnect their calling from the excommunication of Paul, by asserting that the Alexander who did evil to Paul, by maligning him and by broaching heresies upon the resurrection, was really a philosopher, who was only a coppersmith for his amusement. This however is not likely, for it was not usual to designate learned men by the name of their adopted trades. And however this may be, it was Lydia the maker of purple vests who obtained the blessing, while Alexander the coppersmith inherited the curse.

And may I here remark,—for I hope to be permitted to indulge in a good deal of “cross stitch” in these unpretending sketches,—that the best of men of modern times can, like St. Paul, be vigorously minded against their opponents. I will only cite Cowper, who was more wrathful than the Apostle, without the provocation by which the latter was judicially moved.

Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets. He is elevated in his ‘Table Talk;’ acute in detailing the ‘Progress of Error;’ and he chants the praises of ‘Truth’ in more dulcet notes than were ever sounded by the fairest swan in Cayster. His ‘Expostulation’ is made in the tones of a benevolent sage. His ‘Hope’ and his ‘Charity’ are proofs of his pure Christian-like feeling;—a feeling which also pervades his ‘Conversation’ and his ‘Retirement,’ and which barbs the shafts of his satire without taking away from their strength. The same praise is due to the six books of the ‘Task,’ of which perhaps the Garden is the least successful portion. If however we be disposed to find fault at all with anything in his sentiment or expression, it would be in this,—that while he celebrates in warm praises the delights of his own peaceful and retired life—a life which, on the respectable authority of the old medical writer Celsus, I may call as hurtful to the body as it is profitable or necessary to the mind (“Literarum disciplina, ut animo præcipue omnium necessaria, sic corpori inimica est”), there is some illiberality in his declaring that the various occupations of other and more active men are either frivolous or criminal. Cowper patiently enjoys holding the ravelled thread for ladies to wind it on to their bobbins, but he sneers at the party who sits down to chess or stands up to billiards. He will praise air and exercise, if you will only take them in company with him, in covered walks where there is what he so well and quaintly calls

But if you enjoy your air and exercise in field sports, you are more ignoble than your groom, and a greater brute than the victim you pursue. Again: he acknowledges change of scene to be beneficial to the animal economy; but he intends thereby a change from one parish to another. You must not go to France for change, without being undeniably anything but a gentleman and a Christian. He is ready too to eat game and dine on venison, but he would not, for the world, be so guilty as to course a hare or shoot a buck. Finally, he would listen with all imaginable pleasure and rapture to the strains of Handel, were they only composed to the glory and praise of Damon and Dolly, rather than, as they are, to the eulogy of the Messiah and in illustration of His sacrifice.

But why, it may be asked, this piece of patchwork with Cowper’s name thereon? Well, Cowper was something of a tailor in his way, and could sew a button on his sleeve as adroitly, if not as any tailor in town, at least as any sailor in the fleet. And in this he was something akin to Pope Pius VII. when prisoner at Fontainebleau.

What a heavy captivity was that!—not so much for the prisoner, as for those who were compelled to listen to the long and dreary and pointless stories of the good-natured and weak old man. When the officers who had this Pope in charge, were conducting him from Rome to Paris, they on one occasion shut him up in a coach-house, where he remained seated in his carriage, while his captors dined. Cardinal Pacca says of this Pope, who was an admirable tailor when necessity pressed him, that, during the eighteen months he was resident at Fontainebleau, he could never be prevailed upon to quit his own suite of apartments. He, and the Cardinals who accompanied him, were employed in conjugating the verb s’ennuyer. He loved a little gossip, and hated books; but the captive had a solace—one worthy of the dignity of Diocletian, when he cultivated cabbages. Savary, Duke de Rovigo, who was chief gaoler over the chief Pontiff, says, of the latter, that “he did not open a book the livelong day; and he occupied himself in things which, if I had not myself seen, I never should have believed; stitching and mending, for instance, holes and rents in his clothes, sewing a button on his breeches, and washing with his own hands his dressing-gown, on which he had a habit of allowing his snuff to fall in large quantities.” Savary is especially, and naturally, astonished that the supreme Pontiff preferred his amateur tailoring to enjoying the books in the great library of Fontainebleau. Poor man! he did not like reading, but he did like killing time at the point of the needle. The tailors of his community are doubtless proud of such a patron. The story rests on Savary’s authority; and while Cardinal Pacca abuses him for telling it, his Eminence does not deny its authenticity.

But we must not allow the Pope and his pursuits to take us away from the consideration of sacred things. Reverting therefore to the Jews, it may be said of them that if they did not possess the tailor as a professor, they had a sufficient variety of dress to perplex the domestic ministers of fashion. There is quite as much perplexity for those who have to write about it. The Jews, like the modern children of the Prophet, would not tolerate the representation of any living figure, and the antiquary has therefore no chance of consulting a Hebrew ‘Journal des Modes.’ The monuments of nations distant from Palestine cannot be accepted as authority when they are said to represent the Jewish people, for we have no assurance that the people are thereon represented; or if they be Jews, that they are, in slavery, wearing a national costume.

Of one thing however there is a certainty. The Jews had a national costume; and, except in ceremonial dresses and some female appendages, it had very little resemblance indeed to the costume of the Egyptians. The material of Jewish garments was manufactured at home; the skilful hands of the women spinning and weaving the raw material afforded by the flocks. Not all the women appear to have been given to the useful work. There were some fine ladies among the multitude that came out of Egypt, and these had an aristocratically foolish contempt for the spinners and tailoresses of the tribes. But I would especially recommend my fair readers to remember the sacred record, which ennobles labour, where it says:—“All the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen;” and again it is said,—and it sounds like God’s blessing upon the daughters of toil,—“And all the women whose hearts stirred them up in wisdom spun goats’ hair.” No doubt these women, whose hearts were the thrones of wisdom, were primeval tailoresses. And much value was set upon the habits which they made, the shaping of which, I may add, presented little difficulty. The principal article of dress was an ample woollen garment,—a cloak by day, and a couch by night. It served two purposes, like Goldsmith’s stocking, which, at night, he drew from his feet to place on his head. Much value, I have said, was attached to this garment; as, for instance: “If thou at all take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it to him by that the sun goeth down. For that is his covering only; it is the raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? And it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.”

At Beni Hassan, in Egypt, there are some painted representations of men who are supposed to be the counterfeit presentment of Jews fresh from their own country, and therefore in undoubted Jewish costume. The men are variously attired: they are all sandalled. Some wear only short tunics, others a cloak over the tunic. This cloak or plaid, for it is of a striped and figured pattern, and is described as resembling the fine grass-woven cloth of the South Sea, is worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm, leaving the latter free for action. Other figures are clad in fringed shirts, or tunics of the same material as the plaid, reminding one of the command given unto Moses in the fifteenth chapter of Numbers: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribbon of blue.” And again, in Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself:” and it will be remembered that a formal observance of this command gave ground for censure, when the Jews were, at a later period, reproached because “all their works they do for to be seen of men; they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.”

The garments in the paintings at Beni Hassan are of the very simplest construction. The Hebrew maker of them could hardly have committed the trifling mistake made by Andrew Fern, the weather-brained tailor of Cromarty, who used, says Hugh Miller, “to do very odd things, especially when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that Andrew fabricated for him his first jacket, and that though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes!” There are no pocket-holes visible in the Jewish garments.

The Jews soon learned to enlarge their fringes. In the Valley of Bab el Malook, near Thebes, Belzoni discovered a tomb in which is represented the triumph of Pharaoh Necho, after the victory over the Jews at Megiddo. The Jews, among the captives, look very much like Highlanders, with nothing on but kilts kept down about the knees by leaded bunches of ribbons,—a fashion not unknown to modern Ballerinas, who wear “very thin clothing, and but little of it.” The captives, however, have probably been stripped of their upper garments, which the conquerors may be supposed to have sold to the tailors of Misraim, whereupon to model new fashions for the modish dwellers by the purple Nile.

The Rabbins had some curious ideas touching the original form of Adam, and the peculiar dress made for him and Eve before the Fall. Bartolozzi, in his ‘Bibliotheca Rabbinica,’ notices the tradition that the father of mankind was originally furnished with a tail, but that it was cut off by his Maker, because he looked better without it. Another tradition asserts that, before the fall, Adam and Eve had a transparent covering, a robe of light, of which remnants are left to mankind in the nails of the hands and feet. Let me add, for the sake of those who are fond of adopting primeval colours, that the original hue of the father of man is said to have been a bottle-green. When Stulz furnished Mr. Haynes with his celebrated pea-green coat, the schneider only made him as closely resembling as he could to Eliezer the Tanaite, in his bright green gabardine. And Eliezer if a good patron to tailors, and a wearer of gay colours, was also one of the most learned of men. It is said of him, that if all the firmament were changed into parchment, and the entire ocean into ink, it would not suffice to write all that he knew; for he was the author, among other brief works, of three hundred volumes, solely upon the subject of sowing cucumbers. Perhaps Stulz wished to make the wooer of Miss Foote look as like a philosopher as possible, for Eliezer was not the only sage who walked the world in verdant suit. When Amelia Opie paid her visit to Godwin in Somers’ Town, the teacher of the peoples wore over a fiery crimson waistcoat a bottle-green coat, the colour of the original man, from whom Godwin of course very much doubted whether he really were descended.

The Jews, as rather given to luxury in dress, would have been excellent patrons of the tailors, but for Christian jealousy. In Spain and Portugal, the rich Hebrews were the unqualified delight of the most orthodox of tailors—who loved to dress even more than they did to burn them. But the ultra-pietism of the Queen Regent at Valladolid, in the year 1412,—a year when the prospects of the unfortunate descendants of Israel were particularly gloomy,—put a clog upon trade, without, in any degree, accelerating religion. The counsellor of the Queen was Brother Vincent Ferrer, the inveterate enemy of the Jewish nation. The two together fulminated a decree, in the name of the infant monarch, Don John, which in substance declared that the Jews should live apart, and exercise no trade or calling that was either respectable or profitable. The tailors of Castile would not have been much troubled at this decree, for their old customers had saved money enough to make the fortunes of the entire trade, had it not been for one of the concluding clauses, which did more injury to Christians than to Jews. By these clauses Jews were forbidden to wear cloaks, and were restricted to long robes, of poor materials, over their clothes. The Jewesses were ordered to wear common mantles reaching to their feet, and with hoods to be worn over the head. Disobedience to these clauses was to be visited by “the forfeiture of all the clothes they may have on, to their under garments.” An additional clause fixed against them the canon of a sumptuary law; and no tailor dared to supply to a Jew a suit, the cloth of which cost upwards of thirty maravedis. If the tailor offended against this decree, the Church admonished him, but the law scourged the Jew. The first time a Hebrew donned a suit worth more than the thirty maravedis, he forfeited the suit, and was sent home in his shirt. For a second offence, he forfeited his entire wardrobe; but Justice kept him warm by administering to him a hundred lashes, vigorously applied by the hand of an executioner, who imagined that the more blood he drew the better Heaven would be pleased. For a third indulgence in forbidden finery the Jew was mulcted of all he possessed; “but,” says the gracious Queen Regent, “it is my pleasure that, if the Jews choose, they may make coats and cloaks of the clothes which they now possess.” How lucky for Baron Rothschild that he is not compelled, like his predecessors, to carry his cast-off clothes to his tailor, and have one new coat made out of two old garments!

The Persian Jews were as ill-content at having their tailors’ bills regulated by the Government as were those of the Peninsula. When the Persian Caliphs, who would allow nobody to be well-dressed but the faithful, closed the colleges at Babylon, and expelled the professors, it is said that nobody wept for the latter so much as the handicraftsmen who used to adorn their outward persons. Of these expelled professors, a corsair captured at sea Rabbi Moses, his handsome wife, and their son, Rabbi Hanoch. On their way to Cordova, some Tarquinian-like overtures were made to the lady, who, walking up to her husband, inquired if those drowned at sea would be resuscitated at the resurrection? The Rabbi smiled, and answered with the text:—“The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea.” Thereupon the Hebrew Lucretia plunged into the waves, and her husband into a reverie, in which the calmly-pleasant abounded.

The Jews of Cordova redeemed the other captives, and the first visit of Rabbi père was to a tailor, of whom he ordered an outfit of sackcloth. The honest man was disgusted with his customer’s taste, and valued below cost-price a philosopher who declared that his logic was always more conclusive in sackcloth than in habits spun from finer webs. Attired in his new suit, he entered the Jewish college, where a learned dispute was being carried on with equal warmth and obtuseness. A few words from the mean stranger had an effect like the sun upon a fog, and the president quitting his chair, the man in sackcloth was voted into it by acclamation. The tailor, who had followed out of curiosity, ran to the captain of the corsair, and told him that his late captive was a rare man, of whose value he had been ignorant; and therewith the captain would fain have had the sale cancelled, but the Caliph of Cordova would not listen to such a proposition. Hanoch, the son of Moses, was even more fortunate than his sire, for he espoused a daughter of the House of Peliag. Hanoch displayed such liberality on the occurrence of this union, that for a long time the corporation of tailors, whom he especially benefited on this occasion, were accustomed to name one son in their respective families after so liberal a patron of the craft. The two Jewish households on that day were long celebrated at the hearths of those who made their dresses. The wedding feast was held at Zahara, near the city, and not less than seven hundred Israelites rode thither in costumes that would have dazzled the Incas. Ask a well-to-do Cordovese tailor as to the state of his vocation, and, if he has not now forgotten the once popular legend, he will answer, “It is almost as flourishing, Sir, as in the days of Hanoch, whom our predecessors cursed as a Jew, and blessed as a customer.” It was a neatly cut distinction, and fitted exactly.

Deformity of principle, as well as deformity of person, may sometimes be the mother of Fashion. Thus it is stated by an old French writer, that “the use of great purfles and slit coates was introduced by wanton women;” but he adds, with great unction, that the fashion of these lemans had been adopted by the princesses and ladies of England; and with them he trusts that it will long remain. The same author shows how a fair lady, by following the fashion thus lightly set, became the victim of Satan himself. It must be premised that the author’s daughters had been very desirous of indulging in furred garments, and purfles, and slashed coats; and as the father saved himself from a long bill at the dressmaker’s by telling the following story, I calculate upon the gratitude of all sires similarly beset, if the telling of it here, and by them to their respective young ladies, should be followed by the desired consequences,—which I do not at all anticipate.

A certain knight having lost his wife, and not being at all sure as to the locality in which her spirit rested, applied to a devout hermit, who picked up a living by revealing that sort of secret. In our own days, the Rev. Mr. Godfrey professes to get at the same mystery by dint of table-turning. Well; the reverend gentleman’s ancestor, the hermit, thought upon the question by going to sleep over it; and when he awoke, he informed the knight that he had been, in a vision, to the tribunal of souls, and that he had there learned all about the lady in question. He had seen St. Michael and Lucifer standing opposite each other, and between them a pair of scales, in one of which was placed the lady’s soul, with its select assortment of good deeds; and in the other, all her evil actions. A fiend, with all her garments and jewellery in his possession, was looking on. The beam of the balance had not yet made a movement, when the impetuous St. Michael was about generously to claim the soul thus weighed. Thereupon Lucifer urbanely remarked, that he would take the liberty of informing his once-esteemed friend of a fact probably unknown to him. “This woman,” said he, “had no less than ten gowns and as many coats; and you know as well as I do, my good Michael, that half the quantity would have sufficed for her requirements, and would not have been contrary to the law of God.”

St. Michael looked rather offended at its being supposed that he knew anything about women and their gear, and suggested that too much intercourse with both had been the ruin of his ex-colleague.

“Fier comme un Archange!” was the commentary of the deboshed Lucifer, who, according to some old fathers, tempted Eve in very excellent French. However that may be, he added, “the value of one of this pretty wanton’s superfluous gowns or coats would have clothed and kept forty poor men through a whole winter: and the mere waste cloth from them would have saved two or three from perishing. Touche-fille,” he said, addressing the fiend who carried the finery, “throw those traps into the scale.” The fiend obeyed, by casting them in where the lady’s bad actions lay; and straightway down sank that scale, and upward flew the beam which bore the soul and its ounce of virtues. This was done with such a jerk that the soul itself fell into the outspread arms of Touche-fille, who made off with his prey, without waiting for further award. Lucifer looked inquiringly at St. Michael; but the latter observed, that though his opponent’s aide-de-camp had been somewhat too hasty, he would not dispute the case any further. “But what, may I ask, do you intend to do with her?”

“She shall have a new dress daily, and fancy herself ugly in all.”

“Umph!” said Michael, “you certainly are the most exquisite of torturers.”

“And Michael, despite his modesty, does know what most vexes a woman!”

“Go to —;” whither, the last person addressed had not time to say. He was interrupted by Lucifer, who remarked:—

“I have business upon earth. My affairs at home are well cared for in my absence by a regency.”

And so they parted; and the moral of the tale is, that luxury in dress tends to lead to the Devil. And though it be lightly said, it is also truly said. Let us look through the book of patterns, wherein we may trace the varieties of costume, its fashion and its follies, and see how what was irreproachable today becomes ridiculous tomorrow.