216 THE ANTIQUARIAN. 



that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace- 

 bands ;' at another time he ' puts on his new scallop 

 which is very fine ;' and again we are called on to 

 admire his 'new shaggy purple gown with gold 

 buttons and loop-line/ or the more sober elegance 

 of * a black cloth suit, with white linings under all 

 to appear under the breeches/'* 



All this, it may be said, is mere personal vanity 

 in a dandy of the times ; but the following extract 

 shews a prudent attention to the cost, no question 

 derived from the good master-fashioner, his father, 

 whose ultimate end in creating fine garments was 

 to make money by them — 



"This (Jay I got a little rent in my new fine 

 camlet cloak with the latch of Sir George Carteret's 

 door ; but it is darned up at my tailor's, so that it will 

 be no great blemish to it ; but it troubled me." 



Joseph Clark, a posture-master, who flourished 

 about the same date, and died early in the reign of 

 William III., afforded the tailors much more trouble 

 than did the worthy Mr. Pepys in getting his cloak 

 darned. Some of this man's freaks with the pro- 

 fessors of the shears are recorded in the journal of 

 Philosophical Transactions for July, 1698. It was 

 a practice with Clark, as we find there, to render the 

 powers of distortion, with which Nature had super- 

 endowed his handsome person, a means of ludicrous, 

 but expensive annoyance to the unlucky wights 

 engaged in clothing him. At one time the fashioner, 

 after having taken the measure of a man strait as a 

 cuirassier, would find that his customer was a little un- 

 fortunate in the shape of a hump-back ; returning with 

 the garment altered to this defect, the astonished arti- 

 lan discovered the excrescense metamorphosed into 

 a trifling disparity in the height of his shoulders ; at 

 one measuring Clark would be excessively corpu- 

 lent but hollow in the back ; at another, round 

 shouldered, and with his pouch that of " a lean and 

 slippered pantaloon," in short he was, as many a 

 disappointed habit-maker found to his cost, the very 

 Proteus of the human figure. 



