213 



C$e Creats^e of Catlorie anlr Caslouts. 

 Continued from page 152. 



In closing my enumeration of such as have shewn 

 themselves, par excellence, sartorial worthies I will 

 mention, lest the cordwaiaers should cast in our 

 teeth their great orientalist Gary, — that a first class 

 Hebrew scholar, Robert Hill, had handled the shears 

 and worked with his needle at Buckingham ; and, 

 might the descendants of this craft be called in aid 

 here, we should have Pepys the autobiographer and 

 journalist, in the time of Charles II., whose father was 

 a master fashioner in London ; and Benjamin Robins, 

 who compiled Anson's voyage as it appeared before 

 the public from his lordship's journal and the Cen- 

 turion's log, was the son of a tailor at Bath. But 

 it is time to give a general sketch of the craft in 

 England, which has been thus abundant in literary 

 acquirement and martial exploit. 



The dignity, if not the intrinsic importance, of a 

 calling, will depend much on the value of the ma- 

 terials or the machinery exercised on it ; if we look 

 to the authority of the gleemen in an old song, 

 beginning 



" Take thy old cloak about thee ;" 



Which introduces king Stephen railing at his man 

 of clothes for on overcharge, 



" His trews they cost but half a crown ; 

 He said they were a groat too dear, 

 And called the tailor thief and lown." 



In such a state of society we can hardly suppose 

 the cross-legged artificers to have ranked very high 

 in the community. In Henry the third's time, tailors 

 seem to have stood, perhaps we ought rather to say 

 sat, in a different posture : Holingshed at least asserts, 

 on the authority of Adam Merimalt, that Sir John 

 Arundell, who went on an expedition into France in 

 that reign, " had two and fiftie new suits of apparel 

 of cloth of gold or tissue." This taste for extra- 



