150 ' THE ANTIQUARIAN. 



" He began to rave, 

 And called the tailor a lousy knave :" 



^' Good wife," exclaims the wrathful fashioner, 



" Good wife, good wife, bring out my cross-bow, 

 That I may shoot this scoundrel rrow ;" 



Which mention of a cross-bow as the tailor's wea- 

 pon, shrewdly observes the annotator, is a proof that 

 the ballad was composed, when ? Before the intro- 

 duction of fire-arms. 



I cannot pursue Grose's ballad further at present, 

 but if my auditors will, on returning home, look into 

 the eighty-seventh paper of the Looker-oUy they will 

 find, with similar annotations also, *' an immortal 

 production from the pen of a tailor, contains a tri- 

 umphant enumeration of the advantages by which 

 his brotherhood are distinguished." 



Pursuing a course not much other than his lau- 

 reats of his order, I shall begin by enumerating 

 those among the novennial fraternity who have 

 preeminently distinguished themselves as jnen, I 

 allude here to the fractional part of manhood to 

 which this calling is generally, but, as will appear, 

 erroneously limited. The scandal, however, is an 

 ancient one, being, as a late writer insinuates rather 

 than affirms, so old as the times of Maximus Tyrius 

 the philosopher, who is made to allude to tailors 

 and their bizarre condition in a passage of which the 

 following is a translation : — 



" Forming one body out of many, they work up 

 by splicing them together, one sound integral man.*' 

 But I enter at once on an enumeration that might 

 incline Timon himself, misanthrope as he was, had 

 he but been a tailor, to listen "with a liater leeling 

 strong" to the glories of his craft. And why not? 

 He would hear that civic munificence and martial 

 daring ; that scholastic learning and antiquarian 

 research ; and better still, that the noblest work of 

 mortal philanthropy, no less than the abolition of 

 that stain on human nature the slave-trade, have all 

 been found in tailors! "One of this meek pro- 



