1

Solution Manual for Digital Design 5th Edition by

Mano ISBN 0132774208 9780132774208
Full link download:
Solution Manual:
https://testbankpack.com/p/solution-manual-for-digital-design-5th-edition-
by-mano-isbn-0132774208-9780132774208/

SOLUTIONS MANUAL

DIGITAL
DESIGN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
VERILOG HDL Fifth Edition

M. MORRIS MANO
Professor Emeritus
California State University, Los Angeles

MICHAEL D. CILETTI
Professor Emeritus
University of Colorado,
Colorado Springs
rev 02/14/2012
 2

CHAPTER 1
1.1 Base-10: 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
Octal: 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 40
Hex: 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1A 1B 1C 1D 1E 1F 20
Base-12 14 15 16 17 18 19 1A 1B 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

1.2 (a) 32,768 (b) 67,108,864 (c) 6,871,947,674 1.3

(4310)5 = 4 * 53 + 3 * 52 + 1 * 51 = 58010

(198)12 = 1 * 122 + 9 * 121 + 8 * 120 = 26010

(435)8 = 4 * 82
+ 3 * 81 + 5 * 80 = 28510

(345)6 = 3 * 62
+ 4 * 61 + 5 * 60 = 13710

1.4 16-bit binary: 1111_1111_1111_1111 Decimal

equivalent: 216 -1 = 65,53510
Hexadecimal equivalent: FFFF16

1.5 Let b = base

(a) 14/2 = (b + 4)/2 = 5, so b = 6

(b) 54/4 = (5*b + 4)/4 = b + 3, so 5 * b = 52 – 4, and b = 8

(c) (2 *b + 4) + (b + 7) = 4b, so b = 11

1.6 (x – 3)(x – 6) = x2 –(6 + 3)x + 6*3 = x2 -11x + 22

Therefore: 6 + 3 = b + 1m, so b = 8
Also, 6*3 = (18)10 = (22)8

1.7 64CD16 = 0110_0100_1100_11012 = 110_010_011_001 _101 = (62315 )8

1.8 (a) Results of repeated division by 2 (quotients are followed by remainders):

43110 = 215(1); 107(1); 53(1); 26(1); 13(0); 6(1) 3(0) 1(1) Answer: 1111_10102 = FA16

(b) Results of repeated division by 16:

43110 = 26(15); 1(10) (Faster)

Answer: FA = 1111_1010

1.9 (a) 10110.01012 = 16 + 4 + 2 + .25 + .0625 = 22.3125

(b) 16.516 = 16 + 6 + 5*(.0615) = 22.3125

(c) 26.248 = 2 * 8 + 6 + 2/8 + 4/64 = 22.3125

 3

(d) DADA.B16 = 14*163 + 10*162 + 14*16 + 10 + 11/16 = 60,138.6875

(e) 1010.11012 = 8 + 2 + .5 + .25 + .0625 = 10.8125

1.10 (a) 1.100102 = 0001.10012 = 1.916 = 1 + 9/16 = 1.56310

(b) 110.0102 = 0110.01002 = 6.416 = 6 + 4/16 = 6.2510

Reason: 110.0102 is the same as 1.100102 shifted to the left by two places.

1011.11
1.11 101 | 111011.0000
101
01001
101
1001
101
1000
101
0110

The quotient is carried to two decimal places, giving 1011.11

Checking: 1110112 / 1012 = 5910 / 510 ≅ 1011.112 = 58.7510

1.12 (a) 10000 and 110111

1011 1011
+101 x101
10000 = 1610 1011
1011
110111 = 5510
(b) 62h and 958h

2Eh 0010_1110 2Eh

+34 h 0011_0100 x34h
62h 0110_0010 = 9810 B38
82A 95
8h = 239210

1.13 (a) Convert 27.315 to binary:

Integer Remainder Coefficient

Quotient
27/2 = 13 +½ a0 = 1
13/2 6 +½ a1 = 1
6/2 3 + 0 a2 = 0
3/2 1 +½ a3 = 1
½ 0 +½ a4 = 1

2710 = 110112
 4

Integer Fraction Coefficient

.315 x 2 = 0 + .630 a-1 = 0
.630 x 2 = 1 + .26 a-2 = 1
.26 x 2 = 0 + .52 a-3 = 0
.52 x 2 = 1 + .04 a-4 = 1

.31510 ≅ .01012 = .25 + .0625 = .3125

27.315 ≅ 11011.01012

(b) 2/3 ≅ .6666666667

Integer Fraction Coefficient
.6666_6666_67 x 2 = 1 + .3333_3333_34 a-1 = 1
.3333333334 x 2 =0 + .6666666668 a-2 = 0
.6666666668 x 2 =1 + .3333333336 a-3 = 1
.3333333336 x 2 =0 + .6666666672 a-4 = 0
.6666666672 x 2 =1 + .3333333344 a-5 = 1
.3333333344 x 2 =0 + .6666666688 a-6 = 0
.6666666688 x 2 =1 + .3333333376 a-7 = 1
.3333333376 x 2 =0 + .6666666752 a-8 = 0

.666666666710 ≅ .101010102 = .5 + .125 + .0313 + ..0078 = .664110

.101010102 = .1010_10102 = .AA16 = 10/16 + 10/256 = .664110 (Same as (b)).

1.14 (a) 0001_0000 (b) 0000_0000 (c) 1101_1010

1s comp: 1110_1111 1s comp: 1111_1111 1s comp: 0010_0101
2s comp: 1111_0000 2s comp: 0000_0000 2s comp: 0010_0110

(d) 1010_1010 (e) 1000_0101 (f) 1111_1111

1s comp: 0101_0101 1s comp: 0111_1010 1s comp: 0000_0000
2s comp: 0101_0110 2s comp: 0111_1011 2s comp: 0000_0001
`
1.15 (a) 25,478,036 (b) 63,325,600
9s comp: 74,521,963 9s comp: 36,674,399
10s comp: 74,521,964 10s comp: 36,674,400

(c) 25,000,000 (d) 00000000

9s comp: 74,999,999 9s comp: 99999999
10s comp: 75,000,000 10s comp: 100000000

1.16 C3DF C3DF: 1100_0011_1101_1111

15s comp: 3C20 1s comp: 0011_1100_0010_0000
16s comp: 3C21 2s comp: 0011_1100_0010_0001 = 3C21

1.17 (a) 2,579 → 02,579 →97,420 (9s comp) → 97,421 (10s comp)
4637 – 2,579 = 2,579 + 97,421 = 205810

(b) 1800 → 01800 → 98199 (9s comp) → 98200 (10 comp)

125 – 1800 = 00125 + 98200 = 98325 (negative)
Magnitude: 1675
Result: 125 – 1800 = 1675
 5

(c) 4,361 → 04361 → 95638 (9s comp) → 95639 (10s comp)

2043 – 4361 = 02043 + 95639 = 97682 (Negative)
Magnitude: 2318
Result: 2043 – 6152 = -2318

(d) 745 → 00745 → 99254 (9s comp) → 99255 (10s comp)

1631 -745 = 01631 + 99255 = 0886 (Positive)
Result: 1631 – 745 = 886

1.18 Note: Consider sign extension with 2s complement arithmetic.

(a) 0_10010 (b) 0_100110

1s comp: 1_01101 1s comp: 1_011001 with sign extension
2s comp: 1_01110 2s comp: 1_011010
0_10011 0_100010
Diff: 0_00001 (Positive) 1_111100 sign bit indicates that the result is negative
Check:19-18 = +1 0_000011 1s complement
0_000100 2s complement
000100 magnitude
Result: -4
Check: 34 -38 = -4

(c) 0_110101 (d) 0_010101

1s comp: 1_001010 1s comp: 1_101010 with sign extension
2s comp: 1_001011 2s comp: 1_101011
0_001001 0_101000
Diff: 1_010100 (negative) 0_010011 sign bit indicates that the result is positive
0_101011 (1s comp) Result: 1910
0_101100 (2s complement) Check: 40 – 21 = 1910
101100 (magnitude)
-4410 (result)

1.19 +9286 → 009286; +801 → 000801; -9286 → 990714; -801 →999199

(a) (+9286) + (_801) = 009286 + 000801 = 010087

(b) (+9286) + (-801) = 009286 + 999199 = 008485

(c) (-9286) + (+801) = 990714 + 000801 = 991515

(d) (-9286) + (-801) = 990714 + 999199 = 989913

1.20 +49 → 0_110001 (Needs leading zero extension to indicate + value);

+29 → 0_011101 (Leading 0 indicates + value)
-49 → 1_001110 + 0_000001→ 1_001111
-29 → 1_100011 (sign extension indicates negative value)

(a) (+29) + (-49) = 0_011101 + 1_001111 = 1_101100 (1 indicates negative value.)

Magnitude = 0_010011 + 0_000001 = 0_010100 = 20; Result (+29) + (-49) = -20

(b) (-29) + (+49) = 1_100011 + 0_110001 = 0_010100 (0 indicates positive value) (-29) + (+49) = +20
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November, 1669, to divert the royal children, 1365 livres.” The royal
children of France must have had enough of this sort of amusement, the
Dauphin particularly, who had already had two months of puppet-playing
before Brioché came, as is shown by the same registry:—“Paid to
François Daitelin, puppet-player, for the fifty-six days he remained at St.
Germain, to amuse Monseigneur le Dauphin (July and August, 1669),
820 livres.”
Bossuet, the Dauphin’s tutor, persecuted both puppets and Protestants,
which, and especially the latter, were reckoned for a time among the
things that were reprobate and abominable. Brioché himself was
suppressed; but he had friends at court; and the King, who would execute
a Protestant for preaching, signed a decree which authorized the
mountebank to continue playing. Due gratitude was shown in return; and
among the favourite pieces represented at the famous fairs of St.
Germain and St. Laurent, was ‘The Destruction of the Huguenots.’
The puppet-plays at the fairs in Paris were got up with much
magnificence, and were wittily written,—but with as much indecency as
wit; particularly during the last years of Louis XIV. and the time of the
Regent. The puppets alone had full liberty of speech, when every other
sort of liberty was extinct. Le Sage and Piron, as I have said, wrote
pieces expressly for them. And while plays in France were acted in
puppet-shows, puppet-shows in England were introduced into plays. Of
this the ‘Bartholomew Fair’ of Jonson is a sufficient example. The vogue
of the French puppets is proved by the fact that the Regent Duke of
Orléans, with his company of roués, often remained in the fair till long
after midnight, to witness representations where the coarser the wit the
more it was enjoyed.
All the chefs-d’œuvre of the French stage were immediately parodied
on the puppet-boards; and saving the license of speech, the parody was
often superior to the original. It was so attractive that the regular actors
complained, and sought for the suppression of their wooden rivals. But
Punch and his brethren pleaded for their ancient privilege, “de parler et
de p⸺⸺r.” The plea was held good, and the puppets triumphed over the
Thespians. The quarrel being a family one, it was of course carried on
with undying hostility. The puppet-players took every opportunity of
ridiculing the extravagances of the more serious stage. When the custom
of calling for “the author” of a successful new piece was established,
upon the example set of calling for Voltaire after the first representation
of ‘Merope,’ the puppets availed themselves of the opportunity for
caricaturing. “Le compère pressait Polichinelle de lui faire entendre une
de ses œuvres; et après avoir reçu une réponse très-incongrue, le
compère s’empressait de demander l’auteur! l’auteur! satisfaction que
s’empressait de lui donner Polichinelle, aux grands éclats de rire de
l’assemblée.”
The contrast with this will call up but a ghastly smile when we find
that while the crowd on the Place Louis XV. was waiting to witness the
execution of the King, Punch was being serio-comically guillotined in
one corner of the square, to the great delight of the spectators. Indeed the
‘Vieux Cordelier’ tells us, that Punch daily filled up the intervals of
executions; and so varied the pleasures of the humane but impatient
multitude. But what neither the ‘Vieux Cordelier,’ nor M. Magnin tells
us, is the fate of this very Punch, or rather of the man and his wife who
exhibited the popular puppet. Their fate is recorded by the Marquis de
Custine. Punch, it appears, ventured on some jokes against the Terrorists.
His master and mistress were thereupon seized. They bore their brief
imprisonment with heroism, and they were executed on the spot whereon
had perished their sovereign and queen.
The puppets went down in the general hurricane of the Revolution,
and they only partially came again to the surface. To their ancient shows
on the Boulevard du Temple has succeeded a line of theatres; and the
chief resulting difference is, that very awkward men and women now
enact the most sacred subjects where puppets once did the same office
less revoltingly.
If a popular movement finally declared that the puppet dynasty had
ceased to reign, it was a despotic will that abolished the use of such
effigies in church spectacles. Louis XIV., on witnessing one of those
sights at Dieppe, was so shocked thereat that he ordered their general
suppression. The French word for puppet, Marionnette, applied
originally only to figures of the Virgin Mary; but, like the Catrinette of
the little Savoyard, it has ceased to have an exclusive application.
With regard to puppets in England, those wooden ladies and
gentlemen once figured largely in our church-shows, interludes, and
pageants. The names of the puppet masters have come down to us, from
Pad, Cookley, Powell, and the daughter of Colley Cibber, to no less a
man than Curran, who, taking upon himself, in sport, the charge of a
show for one night, found it so easy when speaking for the mute actors to
maintain both sides of an argument that he was therefore convinced of
his excellent aptitude for the law.
Pepys, as usual, affords us again illustrations of the fashion which
attached to puppets in his day. From his brief journalizing we obtain a
world of information on this matter. Thus we find him recording:—“12th
Nov. 1661. My wife and I to Bartholomew Fayre, with puppets (which I
had seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I
love the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all,
but think it to be a lessening of it.” On the 9th May, in the following
year, we find him in Covent Garden, “to see an Italian puppet-play, that
is within the rayles there,—the best that ever I saw, and great resort of
gallants.” In a fortnight he takes poor Mrs. Pepys to the same play. In
October, he says:—“Lord Sandwich is at Whitehall, with the King,
before whom the puppet-plays I saw this summer in Covent Garden are
acted this night.” On the 30th August, 1667, being with a merry party at
Walthamstow, he left his wife to get home as well as she could; he “to
Bartholomew Fayre, to walk up and down, and there, among other
things, find my Lady Castlemaine at a puppet-play, ‘Patient Grizell,’ and
the street full of people expecting her coming out. I confess I did wonder
at her courage to come abroad, thinking the people would abuse her; but
they, silly people, do not know the work she makes; and therefore
suffered her with great respect to take coach, and so away without any
trouble at all.”
The last allusion made by Pepys on this subject forms an admirable
commentary on the approving ecstasy expressed by the royalists at the
lashing which the “Precisians” received at the hands of Lantern’s puppets
in Jonson’s comedy. On the 5th September, 1668, Pepys is again on the
old ground, “to see the play ‘Bartholomew Faire,’ and it is an excellent
play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only” (he adds) “the
business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they
being the people that at last will be found the wisest.”
I began this chapter with a quotation from Puysieux—I may end it
with that just cited from Pepys; and therewith, lowering the curtain of
my little theatre, I beg the indulgence of my audience for the succeeding
portions of what I have respectfully to bring before them; something
more especially touching Tailors, and the Man whose making is to
Tailors due! First, however, to treat the matter reverently, let us inquire
what influenced the ancient corporation in their selection of a protecting
Saint.
 TOUCHING TAILORS.

“Rem acu tetigisti.”—H .

“You have treated of a matter about the needle.”—Translated by a
Merchant Tailors’ Pupil.
“Sit merita Laus!”—S . W ,A .
“Sit, merry Tailors.”—Freely rendered by the Saint’s Chaplain.
 WHY DID THE TAILORS CHOOSE ST.
WILLIAM FOR THEIR PATRON?
“King David’s confessor is worth a whole calendar of Williams.”—
L T .

Why did the tailors choose St. William for their patron? Ah, why? I
confess it puzzles me to furnish a reply; and I would not be editor of that
pleasant paper ‘Notes and Queries,’ if my official hours were to be
passed in furnishing answers to such questions.
I can understand why St. Nicholas is the patron of children. The Saint
once came upon a dozen or two in a tub, cut up, pickled, and ready for
home consumption or foreign exportation, and he restored them all to life
by a wave of his wand,—of his hand, I should say, but I was thinking of
Harlequin; and thenceforth parents very properly neglected their
children, knowing that Nicholas was their commissioned curator.
I can comprehend why “St. John Colombine” is the patron saint of
honest workmen. I heard Dr. Manning, the other day, tell his story from
that thimble of a pulpit in the Roman Catholic Chapel at Brook Green.
This John was a journeyman tailor (or of some as honest vocation) given
to strong drink and hot wrath. He was one day made insanely furious
because his real Colombine, his wife, had not got his dinner ready
according to order. The good housewife bethought her for a moment, and
thereupon, after turning aside, placed before him, not bread, but
biography; not a loaf and a salad, but the ‘Lives of the Saints.’ John
dipped into the same, devoured chapter after chapter, and fed so largely
on the well-attested facts, that he lost all appetite for aught besides. He
thenceforth so comported himself that future editors gave him a place in
the catalogue of the canonized; and the story, as told by that pale and
care-worn-looking Dr. Manning, is worth the shilling which you must
disburse if you would hear it. Certainly, I mean nothing disrespectful to
that sincere but seemingly unhappy man, when I say that so startling was
the story as introduced into a discourse upon the Spirit of the Lord and
they who are led by such Spirit, that I could not have been more startled
if, in the days of my youth, the Bleeding Nun in ‘The Travellers
Benighted’ had, in the midst of her most tremendous scene, tripped down
to the foot-lights and sung a comic song.
But this will not answer the query, “Why did the tailors choose St.
William for their patron?” Indeed, the digression I have made may be
taken for proof that I do not know how to answer the question. But let us
at least inquire.
First, there was the Savoyard Saint William, who, when an orphan,
abandoned the friends who would have protected him; and after
wandering barefooted to the shrine of that Saint whom English boys
unwittingly celebrate by their grottoes, “only once a year,” St. James of
Compostella, proceeded to the kingdom of Naples, where he withdrew to
a desert mountain, and passed his time in contemplating the prospect
before him. He lacerated his skin instead of washing it, and he patched
his own garments when he might have earned new ones by honest
labour. But he founded a community of monks and friars, and ergo he is
celebrated by the hagiographers. A contempt for saponaceous
applications, and a disregard of upper appearance or under comfort, have
decidedly descended to the brotherhood of tailors from William of
Monte Vergine.
Secondly, there was William of Champeaux, who founded the Abbey
of St. Victor at Paris. This William was a man of large learning and small
means; and he was well content to dine daily on a lettuce, a pinch of salt,
and a mouthful of bread. The shadows of dinners which form the
substance of tailors’ repasts, are reflections from the board of William of
Champeaux.
Thirdly, there was William of Paris, the familiar friend of St. Louis,
King of France. This bishop, next to piety, was famed for his knowledge
of politics; and as tailors have ever been renowned for knowing what is
going on “i’ the capitol,” and for discussing such goings on with
uncommon freedom, I think we may trace this characteristic of the race
to the news-loving and loquacious prelate of eight centuries ago.
Fourthly, there was St. William of Maleval, of sufficiently ignoble
birth to have been a tailor; and who did, in his youth and his cups, what
modern young tailors frequently offer to do under similar circumstances,
namely, enlist. If our useful friends have not imitated the latter example
set them by the Saint, we may trace their love of the pot, at least, to the
early model they found in their patron of Maleval; and if often they find
themselves in the station-house, lying upon no softer bed than the bare
ground, they doubtless find the reflection as feathers to their bruised
sides, that it was even thus that the founder of the Gulielmites lay in a
cave of the Evil Valley to which he gave a name (Male Val), and which
before was known by no better than the Stable of Rhodes.
Fifthly, there was William of Gelone, Duke of Aquitaine, whom it
took St. Bernard twice to convert before he made a Christian of him; and
who had such gallant propensities that he might have been one of the
couple sung of in the ‘Bridal of Triermain,’ where of three personages it
is said that—

“There were two who loved their neighbours’ wives,

And one who loved his own.”

The well-known gallantry of the tailors therefore is an heirloom from

William of Aquitaine.
Sixthly, there was William sometime Archbishop of Bourges, who left
to the guild of whom we are treating the example which is followed by
so many of its members, and which consisted in utterly dispensing with a
shirt. He further never added to his costume in winter, nor diminished
anything in it in summer; and they who have taken St. William for a
patron are known, though not for the same reasons, to be followers of the
same fashion.
Then there was, seventhly, St. William of Norwich, whose father, after
hesitating whether to bind him apprentice to a tailor or a tanner, had just
placed him with the latter when the lad was seized upon by the Jews, and
by them tortured and crucified, in derision of Christ. On Easter Day they
put the body into a sack, and carried it into Thorpe Wood, where it was
afterwards discovered, and buried, with many miraculous incidents to
illustrate the funeral; and where was afterwards erected the chapel of St.
William in the Wood. Now, at first sight, it would appear difficult to
decide as to what the tailors’ guild derived from William of Norwich.
But it is only at first sight, and to those unaccustomed to follow a trail,
and not determined to find what they are looking for. In allusion to what
had befallen the body of St. William, or rather in memory of how that
body was conveyed away, after life had been expelled from it, the
Norwich tailors first adopted that now consecrated phrase of “getting the
sack,” and which phrase implies a loss of position, to the detriment of the
loser.
 But I have not done; Williams are as plentiful as blackberries. There is
an eighth, the Abbot of Eskille, who no more liked to play sub-prior to a
superior than Garrick liked to play an unapplauded Falconbridge to
Sheridan’s King John. William of Eskille was a great reformer of slothful
convents, by whose inmates he was as much detested as an honest and
vigilant foreman is by operatives who work by the day. One thing
deemed worthy of mention by his biographers consists in the dreary fact
that he wore the same shirt for thirty years. At the end of that time he
turned it, and then piously blessed the saints for “the comfort of clean
linen.” I question if even modern tailors have succeeded in attaining to
this extent of saintly uncleanliness, but I would not be too certain of that
fact. As for what they may further have derived from this excellent
person, it is well known that for an abbot to be called an Abbot d’Eskille
was the highest possible compliment that could be paid him; and so the
phrase fell to other camaraderies, and a Tailleur d’Eskille was the origin
of a tailor of skill. But this is confidential, reader,—between you and me.
If you are related to an etymologist, or on friendly terms with a
lexicographer, I earnestly beg that you will not mention it, even “after
dinner.”
Under the mystic number “nine,” I come to that William Archbishop
of York, who was the nephew of Stephen King of England, and whom
old St. Bernard belaboured with as many hard words as ever Sir Richard
Birnie hurled, on a Monday morning, on ex-inebriated tailors captured
on the preceding Saturday night. I do not believe a word of what the irate
St. Bernard says against St. William, whom he accuses of the most
horrible crimes. The slightest charge in the bill of indictment drawn up
by him, whom Hurden calls a wicked old impostor, is love of good
living. St. William, like honest Archiepiscopus Wilfred, had a tender
inclination for roast goose! Oh, benedicte Gulielme! may you have found
the bird ever as your inclination,—tender! The sacred goose is an
appanage of the tailors, and it dates from that jovial St. William whom
St. Bernard hated as cordially as though the former had made the latter’s
hair-shirt too tight to comfortably breathe in after supper.
Our tenth example is the St. William who was bishop of St. Brieux, in
Brittany, who often pawned his robes to purchase corn for the poor. Here
we see whence the society of tailors borrow their authority for depositing
pledges, in order to purchase distillations from corn, and for the poor
also,—their poor selves. This is highly satisfactory.
 There was one more William, namely, he who, English by birth, was
the introducer of Christianity into Denmark, and who was of such good
repute when living that he was buried in the mausoleum of the Danish
kings, at Roeskild, after death. It was remarked of him that when he was
reproving “drunken Denmark,” he invariably held his pastoral staff as
though he were taking measure, as he probably was of the royal bad
habits; and perhaps on this account he has come in for a share of the
patronage exercised over the guild whose members take measure of men.
And now let it be observed, that although I have mentioned eleven
Williams, there are only nine of them who really rank among the
canonized saints. Is not that suggestive? The fraternity, of whom it takes
nine members to make a man, have naturally supposed that it would take
nine saints to make one patron. It is clear, then, that it is not to one
William, but to nine combined, that the guild address, or did in olden
times address, their vows and acknowledgments; and exactly for the
reason that there are nine Saint Williams have the English tailors chosen
them, in a mass, for their one consolidated patron. Quod erat
demonstrandum!
And now, having seen how the tailors took their patron, let us consider
them generally. There have been many of note, either of themselves or in
their sons. Church, bar, army, navy, poetry, and the stage,—they have by
turns excelled in all.
If Barrow rose from his father’s shop, where he was early initiated in
the mysteries of mercer and draper, to wear his well-earned dignity in the
Church, there was nothing wonderful in the elevation. The father of our
present Archbishop of York kept, at Cambridge, a shop like that of
Barrow’s father. One of the most active and useful of the Yorkshire
rectors was himself in early life of the craft; and there is no more zealous
or efficient missionary in Ireland than the Rev. Mr. Doudney, the brother
of the well-known London tailor of that name.
In the olden times,—that is, some two centuries ago,—the boy who
passed from his father’s shop-board to enter, as a man, the pulpit, was of
very High Church principles, if we may take Shadwell’s portrait of
Smirk in the ‘Lancashire Witches’ as a faithful portraiture. Smirk is a
little given, as Brother Ignatius advises all Roman Catholic servants in
Protestant families to be, to inquire into the family secrets, for which his
patron, Sir Edward Harfort, to whom he is chaplain, reproves him. The
following sharp dialogue then ensues:—
 “Smirk. Consider, Sir, the dignity of my function.

Sir Ed. Your father is my tailor. You are my servant;

And do you think a cassock and a girdle
Can alter you so much as to enable
You (who before were but a coxcomb, Sir)
To teach me?

Smirk. My orders give me authority to speak.

A power legantine I have from Heaven.

Sir Ed. Show your credentials.

The indiscretion of such paltry fellows
Are scandals to the Church and cause they preach for.
With furious zeal you press for discipline,
With fire and blood maintain your great Diana,
Foam at the mouth when a Dissenter’s named,
And damn them if they do not love a surplice.

Smirk. Had I the power I’d make them wear pitcht surplices.

Sir Ed. Such firebrands as you but hurt the cause.

The learned’st and the wisest of your tribe
Strive by good life and meekness to o’ercome them.”

It is worth recording that this rather high-toned chaplain Smirk, son of

Smirk the Tailor, came under the censure and the scissors of the
scrupulous Master of the Revels. This delicate official could tolerate the
Smirks of Etherege, but when Shadwell exhibited one with something
like sincerity dragging after his faults, the whole town, ay, and the court
too, cried out shame! The wisdom of our ancestors does not appear to
match with the assurance which affects to give warranty of it.
To turn from poetry to prose, I have to remark that Ingulph, the Abbot
of Croyland, who wrote the pleasant story of his monastery, appears to
me to have been (possibly) a tailor’s son. The good old man does not
indeed say as much, but he intimates that he was a cockney of humble
origin; and, if “vous êtes orfèvre, Monsieur Josse,” have a significance,
why something of the same sort may be detected in the phrases and, I
may add, in the deeds of the Chronicler of Croyland.
 Ingulph was a Westminster boy and an Oxford scholar. Speaking of
his studies at the latter place, he says:—“After I had made progress
beyond most of my fellows in mastering Aristotle, I also clothed myself
down to the heels with the first and second rhetoric of Tully. On growing
to be a young man, I loathed the narrow means of my parents, and daily
longed with the most ardent desire to leave my paternal home, and
sighed for the palaces of kings and princes, to clothe myself in soft or
pompous raiment.” If Molière’s Monsieur Josse was discovered to be a
goldsmith by the setting of his criticism, we may say that Ingulph was of
a tailorish origin by the cut of his phrases. And so, as I have said, of his
acts: in these there is a strong redolence of what the vulgar call
“cabbage.” For instance, when “trustworthy reports” were made by local
valuers of land and property, in order that the same should be taxed, and
the said valuers visited Croyland to that intent, Ingulph thus exultingly
records what took place:—“Those persons showed a kind and benevolent
feeling towards our monastery, and did not value the monastery at its
true revenue, nor yet at its exact extent; and thus, in their compassion,
took due precautions against the future exactions of the kings, as well as
other burdens, and with the most attentive benevolence made provision
for our welfare.” It is curious to see how robbing the king’s exchequer in
favour of a monastery is called attentive benevolence; how fraudulent
returns are spoken of as “trustworthy reports;” and how the Lord Abbot
of Croyland, the personal favourite of William the Conqueror, cheated
the master who confided in him, and practically illustrated the text,
“Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.”
Till a very recent period it was the invariable custom, whenever a
Frenchman appeared on our stage, to represent him ridiculously attired.
This was originally done out of revenge for an affront put upon us by
Catherine de’ Medici; who, instigated by the Duc de Guise, had dressed
up her buffoons at a court entertainment, and called them English
milords. Elizabeth made a capital remark when she was told of this
insult. She called aloud, in full court, to the French Ambassador, that
when these French buffoons were declared in presence of her own
Ambassador, Lord North, to be English noblemen, that envoy ought to
have told those who witnessed the unseemly entertainment, that the
tailors of France who had so mimicked the costume of her great sire
Henry VIII. should have better remembered the habiliments of that great
King, since he had crossed the sea more than once with warlike engines
displayed, and had some concern with the people there.
 The most fortunate, perhaps I ought to say the most successful, tailor
of very recent times, was Mr. Brunskill, whose seat of operations was at
Exeter. No provincial, and not above one metropolitan, tailor ever
realized such a fortune as he did: it was realized not by luck, but by
labour. For the first seven years that he was in business on his own
account he worked seventeen hours a day. And if he went to church on
Sundays, he plied his needle none the less actively during the other hours
of that day. This is the worst feature in the case; but he probably
entertained a religious respect for that maxim of St. Augustine which
tells us, “qui laborat, orat.” It was his boast that he was the only man in
Exeter who could ride forty miles a day and cut out work for forty
journeymen besides. This assiduity had its reward, and Brunskill’s
business soon returned above £25,000 annually. Of course young heirs
and youths rich only in present hopes resorted to him for loans; and
Brunskill was as successful as a money-broker as he was in his other
vocation. Cent. upon cent. reared the structure of his edifice of fortune;
and long before a quarter of a century had elapsed since he commenced
his career, he was proprietor of Polsloe Park, and, if not a ’squire
himself, training his three lads to take station with ’squires. In the
meantime, constant labour was his dear delight, and he was ever at his
board or his bank, making men by a double process,—some, by dressing
their persons; some, by dressing their credit,—and, in either case, with
good security for prompt payment. He was thus hard at work up to one
Monday night not many months ago, and on the following Thursday
morning he was a dead man. Corporal Trim himself might here have
found a theme whereon to deeply philosophize. Leaving that profitable
occupation to our old friend the Corporal, let us look at the half pleasant,
half stern realities of the case. Brunskill left three sons: to the two
younger he bequeathed £10,000 apiece; to the eldest, £200,000 and
Polsloe Park. The younger may wear their crape with satisfaction, and
the eldest heir may bless the needle which pricked him out so pretty a
condition. His sire has made him first gentleman of a future race of
county ’squires; and I beg to assure heirs to come in after times from this
peculiar source, that they will have less to be ashamed of than have those
noble gentlemen and ladies who descend from concubines of kings, and
who exist upon the wages of their first mother’s pollution.
We have now considered both the patron and his flock; let us now see
how the latter have been treated by the lively poets who have “fine-
drawn” them in immortal verse.
THE TAILORS MEASURED BY THE POETS.
“Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori.”—H .

Oh, Thersites, good friend, how scurvily hast thou been dealt with at
the hands of man! Thou art emphatically un homme incompris, but thou
art not therefore un homme méprisable. The poets have comprehended
thee better than the people; and Homer himself has no desire to prove
thee the coward and boaster for which thou art taken by the world on
Homeric authority. I think that Ulysses, with whom, in the ‘Iliad,’
Thersites is brought in contact, is by far the greater brute of the two. The
husband of Penelope is cringing to the great, and cruel to the lowly. He
appears much less fitted for a king than for a Poor-law Commissioner.
He unmercifully smites the deformed Thersites with his sceptre; but
why?—because the latter, so far from being a coward, had had the
courage to attack Agamemnon himself before the whole assembled
Greeks. He is ridiculed for the tears extorted from him by pain and
shame; and yet weeping, among the heroes of Greek epic and tragic
poetry, is indulged in on all occasions by the bravest of the brave. There
is nothing that these copper-captains do more readily or more frequently,
except lying, for which they exhibit an alacrity that is perfectly
astounding. The soft infection will run through two whole armies, and
then the universal, solemn shower rises into the majesty of poetry; but
when our poor, ill-treated friend drops a scalding tear, in his own solitary
person, it is then bathos! I concede that he talked too much; but it was
generally close to the purpose, and fearless of results. His last act was
one of courage. The semi-deified bully Achilles, having slain
Penthesilea, cried like a school-boy at his self-inflicted loss; and
Thersites, having laughed at him for his folly, paid for his bold
presumption with his life. There is another version of his death, which
says that, the invincible son of Thetis having visited the dead body of the
Amazon with unnatural atrocities, the decent Thersites reproached him
for his unmanly conduct, and was slain by him in rage at the well-
merited rebuke. Shakspeare, who did all things perfectly, makes of
Thersites a bold and witty jester, who entertains a good measure of scorn
for the valiant ignorance of Achilles. The wit of the latter, with that of
his brother chiefs, lies in their sinews; and their talk is of such a skim-
milk complexion that we are ready to exclaim, with bold Thersites
himself, “I will see you hanged like clotpoles ere I come any more to
your tents; I will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of
fools.”
As it has been with our poor friend Thersites, so has it been with our
useful friends whose faculties are ever given to a consideration of the
important matter “De Re Vestiariâ.” The poets however do not partake of
the popular fallacy; and the builders of lofty rhyme are not unjust, as we
shall see, to a race whose mission it is to take measures in order to save
godlike man from looking ridiculous.
Shakspeare of course has rendered this full justice to the tailor. In his
illustrations we see our ancient friend variously depicted, as industrious,
intelligent, honest, and full of courage, without vapouring. The tailor in
‘King John’ is represented as the retailer of news, and the strong
handicraftsman listens with respect to the budget of the weakly
intelligencer.

“I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,

The while his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers (which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet),
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattlèd and rank’d in Kent.”

It is clear that nothing less than an invasion had driven this hard-
working artisan from his shop-board to talk of politics and perils with his
friend at the smithy. The German poet Heyne has something of a similar
description of the tailor, in prose: in his ‘Reisebilder’ there is an
admirably graphic account of how the Elector John William fled from
Düsseldorf, and left his ci-devant subjects to render allegiance to Murat,
the grand and well-curled Duke of Berg; and how, of the proclamations
posted in the night, the earliest readers in the grey morning were an old
soldier and a valiant tailor, Killian,—the latter attired as loosely as his
predecessor in ‘King John,’ and with the same patriotic sentimentality in
the heart which beat beneath his lightly burdened ribs.
But, to revert to “Sweet Will,” how modestly dignified, assured, and
self-possessed is the tailor in ‘Katherine and Petruchio!’ The wayward
bridegroom had ridiculed the gown brought home by the “woman’s
tailor” for the wayward bride. He had laughed at the “masking-stuff,”
sneered at the demi-cannon of a sleeve, and profanely pronounced its
vandyking (if that term be here admissible) as

“carved like an apple-tart.

Here’s snip and nip, and cut, and slish and slash,
Like to a censer in a barber’s shop.”

To all which profanity against divine fashion, the tailor modestly

remarks that he had made the gown, as he had been bidden,

“orderly and well,

According to the fashion and the time.”

And when Petruchio, who is not half so much of a gentleman in this

scene as Sartorius, calls the latter “thimble,” “flea,” “skein of thread,”
“remnant,” and flings at him a whole vocabulary of vituperation, the
gentle schneider still simply asserts that the gown was made according to
direction, and that the latter came from Grumio himself. Now Grumio,
being a household servant, lies according to the manner of his vocation;
and where he does not lie, he equivocates most basely; and where he
neither lies nor equivocates, he bullies; and finally, he falls into an
argument, which has not the logical conclusion of annihilating his
adversary. The latter, with quiet triumph, produces Grumio’s note
containing the order; but it costs the valet no breath, and as little
hesitation, to pronounce the note a liar too. But a worm will turn; and the
tailor, touched to the quick on a point of honour, brings his bold heart
upon his lips, and valiantly declares, “This is true that I say; an I had thee
in place where, thou shouldst know it;” and thereupon Grumio falls into
bravado and uncleanness, and the tailor is finally dismissed with scant
courtesy, and the very poor security of Hortensio’s promise to pay for
what Petruchio owed. The breach of contract was flagrant, and the only
honest man in the party was the tailor.
So much for honesty; as for bravery, commend me to forcible Francis
Feeble. He too was but a “woman’s tailor;” but what an heroic soul was
in that transparent frame! He reminds me of Sir Charles Napier. When
the latter hero was complimented by the Mayor of Portsmouth, he simply
undertook to do his best, and counselled his worship not to expect too
much. Sir Charles must have taken the idea of his speech from Francis
Feeble; and what an honour is that for the entire profession, not of
sailors, but of tailors! “Wilt thou make me,” asks Falstaff, “as many
holes in an enemy’s battle, as thou hast done in a woman’s petticoat?” “I
will do my good will, Sir,” answereth gallant Feeble, adding, with true
conclusiveness, “you can have no more.” Well might Sir John
enthusiastically hail him as “courageous Feeble,” and compare his valour
to that of the wrathful dove and most magnanimous mouse,—two
animals gentle by nature, but being worked upon not void of spirit.
Indeed, Feeble is the only gallant man of the entire squad of famished
recruits. Bullcalf offers “good master corporate Bardolph” a bribe of
“four Harry ten shillings in French crowns,” to be let off. Not that
Bullcalf is afraid! Not he, the knave; he simply does not care to go! He is
not curious in things strategic; he seeth no attraction in stricken fields;
but he would fain be out of harm’s way, because, in his own words,
—“because I am unwilling, and, for mine own part, have a desire to stay
with my friends; else, Sir, I did not care, for mine own part, so much.” To
no such craven tune runneth the song of stupendous Feeble! Mouldy
urges affection for his old dame as ground of exemption from running
the risk of getting decorated with a bloody coxcomb. No such jeremiade
is chanted by Titanic Francis. “By my troth,” gallantly swears that lion-
like soul,—“by my troth, I care not!” He, the tailor, cares not! neither
subterfuge, lie, nor excuse will he condescend to! Moreover, he is not
only courageous, but Christian-like and philosophical; as, for example:
—“A man can die but once;—we owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base
mind; an it be my destiny, so; an it be not, so; no man’s too good to serve
his prince; and, let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit
for the next.” This was not a man to march with whom through Coventry
a captain need to be ashamed. So valiant, and yet so modest! So
conscious of peril, and yet so bold in the encountering of it! So clear in
his logic, so profound in his philosophy, so loyal of heart, and so
prepared in the latter to entertain any fate, whatever might be its aspect,
or the hour of its coming! Surely, if the prompter’s book be correct, the
exit of this tailor must be directed to be marked with music, to the air of
‘A man’s a man for a’ that.’ Anything less appropriate would fail to do
justice to the situation.
In Francis Feeble then the spirit of the tailor is immortalized.
Compared with him, Starveling, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ is
simply tender-hearted. He is one of the actors in the play of ‘Pyramus
and Thisbe,’ and he is the most ready to second the motion that the
sword of Pyramus should not be drawn, nor the lion be permitted to roar,
lest the ladies, dear souls, should be affrighted. Starveling is more of the
carpet knight than Feeble. The one is gallant in stricken fields, the other
airs his gallantry in ladies’ bower.
It was right that the race of Feebles should not expire. It was said of
old, that to be the sire of sons was no great achievement, but that he was
a man indeed who was the father of daughters. Such no doubt was
Feeble, one of whose spirited girls married a Sketon; and their eldest son
it is, as I would fondly think, who figures so bravely among the
followers of Perkin Warbeck, in John Ford’s tragedy of that name.
Sketon is the most daring of the company, and the blood of the Feebles
suffers no disgrace in his person. Sketon, like the great Duke of Guise, is
full of dashing hope, when all his fellows are sunk in dull despair. While
so august a personage as John à Water, Mayor of Cork, is thinking twice
ere he acts once, Sketon thus boldly and tailor-like cuts out the habit of
invasion, and prepares the garb of victory:—“’Tis but going to sea, and
leaping ashore,” saith he; “cut ten or twelve thousand unnecessary
throats, fire seven or eight towns, take half-a-dozen cities, get him into
the market-place, crown him Richard the Fourth, and the business is
finished!” Is not this a man whom Nature intended for a commander-in-
chief? He is not only quick of resolution, but of action; and yet, I dare be
sworn, Sketon had read nothing of what Caius Crispus Sallust says
thereupon. And I beseech you to mark one thing more. You know that
when the foolish Roman Emperor would not permit the statue of Brutus
to be borne in the funeral procession of Britannicus, lest the people
should think too much upon that imperatoricide, the obstinate and vulgar
rogues thought all the more upon him and his deeds, for the very reason
that his statue did not figure among those of other heroes. So in the
above heart-stirring speech of valiant Sketon, we miss something which
reveals to us how chaste and chivalrous a soldier was the grandson of
Feeble. His views go to bold invasion, to the burning of towns, and the
sacking of cities, and to splendid victory, built upon the cutting of
throats, which he nicely, and as it were apologetically for the act,
describes as “unnecessary throats.” A taste of the quality of the
roystering soldier is perhaps to be found in this speech; but you are
entreated to remark, that all the vengeance of the tailor is directed solely
against his enemy, man. The women, it is evident, have nothing to fear at
the hands of Sketon. He does not mention rudeness to them, just as the
ancient legislator did not provide against parricide, simply because,
judging from his own heart, he deemed the crime impossible. Sketon and
Scipio deserve to go down to posterity hand in hand, as respecters of
timid beauty. There was a Persian victor, too, who would not look upon
the faces of his fair captives, lest he should be tempted to violate the
principles of propriety. Sketon was bolder, and not less virtuous. To my
thinking, he is the Bayard of tailors. It would wrong him to compare him
even with Joseph Andrews; and I will only add that if old Tilly, at
Magdeburg, had been influenced by the virtue of Sketon, there might not
have been less weeping for lost lovers, but there would have been more
maidens left to sit down in cypress, and mourn for them.
Sketon, foremost in fight, is first to hail the man whom he takes for
prince, when victory has induced the Cornish men of mettle to proclaim
at Bodnam, Richard IV. “monarch of England, and king of hearts.”
Jubilant in success, he does not complain when Fortune veils her face.
Defeat and captivity are accepted with dignity when they are compelled
upon him; and when swift death is to be the doom of himself and
companions, he does not object to the philosophical disquisition of his
old leader and fellow-sufferer, Perkin, that death by the sword, whereby
the “pain is past ere sensibly ’tis felt,” is far preferable to being slowly
slain at home by the doctors. For he says:—

“To tumble
From bed to bed, be massacred alive
By some physicians, for a month or two,
In hope of freedom from a fever’s torments,
Might stagger manhood.”

And accordingly Sketon follows Warbeck to death without a remnant of

fear; and I must add, that Henry VII. showed little generosity when he
remarked upon their executions, as he sat comfortably at home,

“That public states,

As our particular bodies, taste most good
In health, when purged of corrupted blood.”

Ford, the dramatic poet, offers indirect testimony to the morality of the
English tailor, by his introduction of a French member of the fraternity in
‘The Sun’s Darling.’ The author calls his piece a moral masque; but
Monsieur le Tailleur utters some very immoral matter in it, such, it may
fairly be supposed, as he could not have put into the mouth of a kinsman
of Starveling.
 Massinger’s tailors again show that they were as much the victims of
their customers as their descendants are now; and the “Who suffers?”—
the facetious query of Mr. Pierce Egan’s ‘Tom and Jerry,’—would have
been quite as appropriate a way of asking the name of a “Corinthian’s”
tailor two centuries ago. “I am bound t’ye, gentlemen,” says the grateful
builder of doublets and trunkhose to his lordly customers. “You are
deceived,” is the comment of the page; “they’ll be bound to you; you
must remember to trust them none.” The scene here, it is true, is in
Dijon; but Massinger, like Plautus, portrayed his country’s manner in
scenes and personages drawn from other climes. This is easily to be
discerned in the former author’s play of ‘The Old Law.’ The scene is laid
in Epirus. A tailor waits upon the young Simonides, who has just
joyfully inherited the paternal estate; but the youthful courtier despises
the operative employed by his sire.

“Thou mad’st my father’s clothes,”

he says.—

“That I confess.
But what son and heir will have his father’s tailor,
Unless he have a mind to be well laugh’d at?
Thou hast been so used to wide long-side things, that, when
I come to truss, I shall have the waist of my doublet
Lie on my buttocks;—a sweet sight!”

This is purely descriptive, not of Epirote, but of old English costume.

The former never changed; our fashions have constantly varied; and the
very long-waisted doublet scorned by Simonides, who talks like the
rakish heir of an old Cheapside drysalter, has descended from the saloon
to the stables. It was once worn by lords; it is now carried by grooms.
But perhaps, on the question of fashions, the remark of the simple-
minded tailor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Fair Maid of the Inn,’ who is
duped so consumedly by Ferabosco the mountebank, is very apt to the
matter. He has travelled, and is willing even to go to the moon, in search
of strange and exquisite new fashions; but, as he says, “all we can see or
invent are but old ones with new names to ’em.” The poets I have last
mentioned exhibit quite as great a contempt for chronology as any of
their harmonious fellows. Thus, Blacksnout, the Roman blacksmith, in
the ‘Faithful Friends,’ living when Titus Martius was King of Rome, tells
Snipsnap, the Latin tailor, that he had not only been in battle, but had
been shot “with a bullet as big as a penny loaf;” he adds, with much
circumstance:—

“’Twas at the siege of Bunnill, passing the straits

’Twixt Mayor’s-lane and Tierra del Fuego,
The fiery isle!”

Snipsnap is the tailor of the poets’ own period. He calls for drink with
the airy freedom of a be-plumed gallant, pays magnanimously, as be-
plumed gallants did not, cuts jokes like a court-jester, and boasts that he
can “finish more suits in a year than any two lawyers in the town.”
Blacksnout’s remark in reply, that “lawyers and tailors have their several
hells,” is rather complimentary than otherwise to the last-named gentle
craft; for it places the tailor, who exercises the time-honoured observance
of “cabbage,” on a level with the lawyer, who purchases his luxuries
through the process of partially stripping his clients. The “hell” here
named is supposed to be the place wherein both lawyers and tailors put
those shreds, of which Lisauro speaks in the ‘Maid in the Mill:’—

“The shreds of what he steals from us, believe it,

Make him a mighty man.”

Ben Jonson alludes to this particular locality in ‘The Staple of News.’

Fashioner waiting past the appointed time upon Pennyboy, Jun.,
compensates for his dilatoriness by perpetrating a witticism, and the
young gentleman remarks thereupon:—

“That jest
Has gain’d thy pardon; thou hadst lived condemn’d
To thine own hell else.”

Fashioner was like Mr. Joy, the Cambridge tailor of an olden time. If that
hilarious craftsman had promised a suit to be ready for a ball, and did not
bring it home till the next morning at breakfast, his stereotyped phrase
ever took the form of—“Sorrow endureth for a night, but ‘Joy’ cometh
with the morning!” But, to return to the hades of tailors. The reader will
doubtless remember that Ralph, the doughty squire of Hudibras, had
been originally of the following of the needle, and—

“An equal stock of wit and valour

 He had laid in, by birth a tailor.”

Ralph dated his ancestry from the immediate heir of Dido, from whom

“descended cross-legg’d knights,

Famed for their faith.”

And then are we told, with rich Hudibrastic humour, that Ralph, the ex-
tailor, was like Æneas the Pious, for—

“This sturdy squire, he had, as well

As the bold Trojan knight, seen hell;”

which locality, as connected with the handicraftsman, is described as

being the place where tailors deposit their perquisites.
We have digressed a little from Snipsnap, the English tailor, whom
Beaumont and Fletcher have placed with other thoroughly English
artisans in the piece already named, ‘The Faithful Friends.’ Snipsnap
holds his profession to be above that of a soldier, but yet modestly
excuses himself from fighting, on the score that, although a tailor, he is
not a gentleman. Being provoked, however, he knocks down the rude
offender, and has a thorough contempt for the constable,—a contempt in
the entertaining of which he is so well justified by the logical remark of
Blacksnout:—

“A constable’s
An ass. I’ve been a constable myself.”

The bravery of Snipsnap is a true bravery: he is conscious of the peril

in which he stands as a soldier, and, ere going into action, bethinks him
of old prophecies that he should be slain; but when he pictures to himself
the public scorn that ever follows cowardice, and that, if he and his
fellows be poltroons, every wench in Rome will fling dirt at them as they
pass by, saying, “There are the soldiers who durst not draw their blades,”
then is the heroic soul fired, and Snipsnap exclaims:—

“But they shall find we dare, and strike home too:

I am now resolved, and will be valiant;
This bodkin quilts their skin as full of holes
As e’er was canvas doublet.”
“Spoke like a bold man, Snip!” says Bellario, the old soldier. Ay, and like
a discreet and thinking man. There is no foolhardiness and rash action in
Snipsnap; but, like the greatest of heroes, he looks his peril calmly in the
face, and then encounters it with a gallantry that is not to be resisted.
And it is to be observed that the tailors of the poets are as generous as
they are brave. Witness Vertigo in ‘The Maid in the Mill;’ the lords
among whom he stands owe him money, and yet affect to have forgotten
his name. One of them ventures, indeed, to hope that he has not come to
press his claims; and what says this very pearl and quintessence of
tailors?

“Good faith, the least thought in my heart; your love,

gentlemen,
Your love’s enough for me. Money? hang money!
Let me preserve your love!”

Incomparable Vertigo! What a trade might he drive in London upon

those terms! A waistcoat for a good opinion, a fashionable coat for
esteem, and a full-dress suit to be paid for with the wearer’s love, in a
promissory note made payable at sight!
Vertigo understands the dignity of his profession; indeed, he wears a
double dignity, for he is a “woman’s tailor,” as well as “man’s;” and
when he is about to measure Florimel, how bravely does he bid the lords
“stand out o’ th’ light!” How gallantly does he promise the lady when he
swears—or asserts rather (for the tailors of the poets never swear,—that
is, never swear profanely; they are like the nun in Chaucer, whose
prettiest oath was but “by St. Eloy!”)—when he asserts then that she has
“the neatest body in Spain this day;” and further, when Otrante, the
Spanish Count, in love with Florimel, remarks that happily his wardrobe,
with the tailor’s help, may fit her instantly, what self-dignity in the first
line of the reply, and what philosophy in the second!—

“If I fit her not, your wardrobe cannot;

And if the fashion be not there, you mar her.”

Ben Jonson does the trade full justice with regard to their possession of
generosity; thus, in ‘Every Man Out of his Humour,’ Fungoso not only
flatters the tailor who constructed his garment out of the money due for
its fashioning, but he borrows some ready cash of him besides. Upon this
hint did Sheridan often act; and thus posterity suffers through the vices
as through the weaknesses of our ancestors. But the philosophical spirit
of the true artistic tailor has been as little neglected by rare Ben, “the
Canary-bird,” as the same artist’s generosity. The true philosophy of
dress is to be found in a speech of Fashioner’s, in the ‘Staple of News,’
and which speech is in reply to the remark of young Pennyboy, that the
new clothes he has on make him feel wittier than usual: “Believe it, Sir,”
says Fashioner,

“That clothes do much upon the wit, as weather

Does on the brain; and thence, Sir, comes your proverb,
The tailor makes the man. I speak by experience
Of my own customers. I have had gallants,
Both court and country would have fool’d you up,
In a new suit, with the best wits in being,
And kept their speed as long as their clothes lasted,
Handsome and neat; but then as they grew out
At the elbows again, or had a stain or spot,
They have sunk most wretchedly.”

The policy of the tailor is as good as his philosophy, and has the same
end in view, for Pennyboy exultingly says:—

“I wonder gentlemen
And men of means will not maintain themselves
Fresher in wit, I mean in clothes, to the highest;
For he that’s out of clothes is out of fashion;
And out of fashion is out of countenance;
And out of countenance is out of wit.”

And the moral of all is, that if a man would prosper in the world, he
should, at all events, not neglect his tailor.
Of all the poets yet named, Ben Jonson is the only one who introduces
a somewhat dishonest tailor, Nick Stuff, in ‘The New Inn;’ but Apollo
was angry at the liberty, and visited the poet with the retributive
damnation of the piece. Stuff is a “woman’s tailor;” we have none such
now in England, except as makers of ladies’ riding habits. They are rare
in France, but there are as many women’s tailors as female dressmakers
in Vienna; and the latter often order the tailors to take measure for and
cut out the dresses, which the female sewers then, to use a French term,
confection. Nick Stuff used to attire his wife Pinnacia in all the new
gowns he made; and in ever-changing and gallant bravery Pinnacia—but
let her describe Nick’s ways of vanity after her own fashion:—

“It is a foolish trick, madam, he has;

For though he be your tailor, he is my beast;
I may be bold with him, and tell his story.
When he makes any fine garment will fit me,
Or any rich thing that he thinks of price,
Then must I put it on and be his ‘Countess,’
Before he carry it home unto the owners.
A coach is hired and four horse; he runs
In his velvet jacket thus, to Romford, Croydon,
Hounslow, or Barnet.”

Pinnacia proceeds to portray further excesses, but I think there must be

some exaggeration in this; and for this the poet was punished by the
condemnation of his piece. The thing is as clear as logical deduction can
make it. The ‘New Inn’ contained great reproach against the tailors: the
‘New Inn’ was hissed off the stage: argal, for a poet to speak
reproachfully of tailors, is to bring down ruin upon his head! This
deductive process is borrowed from Cardinal Wiseman; and if it be
found defective, I beg to shield myself under that gentleman’s eminent
authority. It is something like accounting for Tenterden steeple by
Goodwin Sands; but of course I cannot help that. Let the candidate for
the tiara look to it!
Taking Nick Stuff as a true sample of those of his craft, who formed
the exception to the general rule of professional honesty, I must say for
such as he, that if he were a knave, it was because for years he had had
an evil example before his eyes in the persons of men better off than
himself, who had not his plea of small means and long credit as an
excuse for bettering his condition at the public cost. If the fashioners of
clothes were sometimes not so careful as they might be in the application
of the principle of honesty, the makers of the cloth were infinitely worse.
They lay under the imputation of being universally fraudulent. We have
no better, and need no better, proof on this matter, than what is afforded
us by the testimony of good old Latimer, who had a sharp eye to detect
vice, and a bold tongue to denounce it. In his third sermon preached
before King Edward VI., there is the following graphic passage:—“I hear
say that there is a certain cunning come up in the mixing of wares. How
say you?—were it not a wonder to hear that clothmakers should become
’pothecaries, yea, and as I hear say, in such a place whereat they have
professed the Gospel and the word of God most earnestly of a long
time.” And then the preacher, after some animadversions on the devil,—
whom he styles in another sermon as the only prelate he knows who is
never absent from his diocese, nor idle when in it,—thus proceeds:—“If
his cloth be seventeen yards long, he will set it on a rack, and stretch it
out with ropes, and rack it till the sinews shrink again, till he hath
brought it to eighteen yards. When they have brought it to that
perfection, they have a pretty feat to thick it again. He makes me a
powder for it, and plays the ’pothecary. They call it flock-powder. They
do so incorporate it to the cloth, that it is wonderful to consider. Truly, a
good invention! Oh that so goodly wits should be so ill applied! they
may well deceive the people, but they cannot deceive God. They were
wont to make beds of flock, and it was a good bed, too; now they have
turned the flock into powder, to play the false thieves with it. These
mixtures come of covetousness. They are plain theft.” From this singular
passage it is apparent that what is popularly known at Manchester as
“devil’s dust,” was an invention which the cotton lords of today have
inherited from their fathers in Mammon, the cloth lords of some three
centuries ago. That ever-active prelate, the devil, is therefore as busily
engaged in his diocese now as he was in the days whose doings are
condemned by Latimer. In some respects however there is improvement,
if we may believe the assertion made by Mr. Thackeray, in his ‘Essays
on the Essayists,’ to the effect that even hermits out at elbows would lose
their respectability now if they were to attempt to cheat their tailors.
Other men succeed in doing so, without forfeiting the privilege conceded
by Mark Antony to Brutus of being “an honourable man.”
Charles Lamb remarks, in his ‘Essay on the Melancholy of Tailors,’
that “drink itself does not seem to elevate him.” This assertion seems
contrary to that in the acting tragedy of ‘Tom Thumb,’ wherein Queen
Dolalolla so enthusiastically exclaims:—

“Perdition catch the railers!

We’ll have a row, and get as drunk as tailors.”

It is to be observed, however, that Fielding is not responsible for this

illustration, which has been made by some adapter, who has had the
temerity to do for the heroic tragedy in question what Cibber did for
‘Richard,’ and Tate for old ‘King Lear.’ The lines however were
delicious when Wilkinson played Queen Dolalolla in the tragedy-style of
Peg Woffington.
The illustration is insulting; and therefore is it anonymous. The poets
generally have, as I have shown, been complimentary to the tailors. Few
of the sons of song have reviled the true “makers of men.” When they
have done so, they have not dared to expose themselves to the sartorian
wrath by boldly avowing their name. None ever did so on so extensive a
scale as the author of the three-act piece, called ‘The Tailors: a Tragedy
for Warm Weather;’ and no author has remained so utterly uncomeatable
by the public curiosity. What is the mystery about Junius, touching
whom there are a thousand guesses, compared with the greater
impenetrability of this secret author, about whom no man ever heard a
conjecture?
It is now nearly ninety years ago since a manuscript was sent from
Dodsley’s shop to Foote, the manager of the “Little Haymarket.” The
manuscript was that of the Warm Weather Tragedy, and Foote was
requested to return the copy if it were not approved of. The great
comedian knew better. The burlesque play of the anonymous author was
acted with a strong cast. Foote himself was the Francesco; Shuter played
Abrahamides, the Flint; Western did justice to Jackides; old Bannister
was ponderous as Campbello; and gay Jack Palmer was just the man to
enact that Lothario of stage-tailors, the seductive Isaacos. Mrs. Jeffries
represented the false wife Dorothea, and Mrs. Gardner the faithful maid
Titillinda. It was said by the critics of the period, that the radical fault of
this burlesque play was, that “in burlesque, the characters ought to be
persons of consequence, instead of which they are here tailors;” but the
truth is, that the fault lies in the fact, that the tailors talk as correctly as
persons of consequence, and are not half so bombastic as Nat Lee’s kings
and queens. The profession exhibited much unnecessary susceptibility in
being offended at this piece. Its tendency, if it have any at all, is rather to
elevate than depress the public appreciation for the tailor, whether in his
aspect of master or of “Flint” out upon strike. The entire action is
devoted to the history of a strike for wages, with a supplemental love-
plot annexed. The head master-tailor is a highly respectable individual,
who has our sympathy because he is betrayed by his wife; and the chief
Flint wins admiration, because he gets hanged and is cheated out of his
mistress. The strike ends unfavourably for those who make it; but though
the author sets out with the determination to render all his dramatis
personæ ridiculous, he cannot do it. He is like the prophet who was
compelled to vaticinate against his inclinations; and the deity of dramatic
poetry and tailors compels him to reverence where he would fain have
committed desecration. The very first sentence in this play contains an
allusion to Elliott’s brigade, that famous band of warriors made up
almost entirely of tailors. I must refer my readers to the piece itself, if
they be curious to see how the subject is treated in evident contrariety to
the author’s own design; he makes all the characters utter commonplace
common sense, when his intention was to make them lose themselves
upon stilts in a sea of tropes, tirades, and thunderings against tyranny.
The antiquarian will not fail to notice that Bedfordbury is a locality set
down in this piece as a place where tailors’ men did congregate some
century ago. They still much do congregate on the same spot. A century
before the period of the piece, Frank Kynaston, the poet, resided in a
house adjacent to the “Bury,” and the memory thereof is still kept up in
the name Kynaston-alley, which is within that same “Bury” of classical
associations. Thus do tailoring and the belles lettres continue to be in
close connection; and where Kynaston’s muse kept itself warm, the
sacred goose of the schneider still glows with fervid heat. The operatives
of the “Bury,” moreover, look as much like poets as tailors,—so abstract
are they of air, so romantically heedless of personal appearance, and so
unromantically and really “half-starved.” Not of them can be said what
Titillinda says of Abrahamides—

“Whose form might claim attention even from queens.”

Finally: want of space, and not of material, brings that troublesome

adverb upon me. If it be objected, that the tailors of the poets do
sometimes waver in critical situations, and condescend to tremble in
presence of emergency, I have to answer, that such facts prove their
heroism, as being akin to that of the Conqueror and Cœur de Lion. When
the former was being crowned at York, he heard such an uproar in the
streets, caused by the massacre of the inhabitants by the amiable
Normans, that he sat upon his throne shaking with affright; “vehementer
tremens,” says Orderic Vitalis, and he is very good authority. As for that
tinselled bully, Richard, nobody doubts his single virtue—courage; but
bold as he was, we all know that when in Sicily, he discreetly ran away
from a bumpkin who threatened to cudgel him for attempting a matter of
petty larceny. Francis Feeble and his brethren may, therefore, not be
ashamed if they have foibles in common with William of Normandy and
Richard of Bordeaux.
 Dr. O. Wendell Holmes has cleverly conjectured what a tailor,
poetically given, might say of the beauties that cluster about the closing
day; and he has thus described

Evening.
BY A TAILOR.

“Day hath put on his jacket, and around

His burning bosom button’d it with stars.
Here will I lay me on the velvet grass,
That is like padding to earth’s meagre ribs,
And hold communion with the things about me.
Ah me! how lovely is the golden braid
That binds the skirt of night’s descending robe!
The thin leaves, quivering on their silken threads,
Do make a music like to rustling satin,
As the light breezes smooth their downy nap.

“Ha! what is this that rises to my touch,

So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage?
It is; it is that deeply-injured flower
Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee,
Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout.
Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright
As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath
Sweeten’d the fragrance of her spicy air;
But now, thou seemest like a bankrupt beau
Stripp’d of his gaudy hues and essences,
And growing portly in his sober garments.

“Is that a swan that rides upon the water?

Oh no! it is that other gentle bird,
Which is the patron of our noble calling.
I well remember, in my early years,
When these young hands first closed upon a goose;
I have a scar upon my thimble-finger,
Which chronicles the hour of young ambition.
My father was a tailor, and his father,
And my sire’s grandsire,—all of them were tailors;
They had an ancient goose,—it was an heirloom
From some remoter tailor of our race.
 It happen’d I did see it on a time
When none was near, and I did deal with it,
And it did burn me,—oh, most fearfully!

“It is a joy to straighten out one’s limbs,

And leap elastic from the level counter,
Leaving the petty grievances of earth,
The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears,
And all the needles that do wound the spirit,
For such an hour of soothing silence.
Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress,
Lays bare her shady bosom; I can feel
With all around me; I can hail the flowers
That sprig earth’s mantle; and yon quiet bird,
That rides the stream, is to me as a brother.
The vulgar know not all the hidden pockets,
Where Nature stows away her loveliness.—
But this unnatural posture of the legs
Cramps my extended calves, and I must go
Where I can coil them in their wonted fashion.”

To conclude: the poets have been quite as guilty of petty larceny as

ever was poor tailor. Pope stole from Pascal, and Addison from Pope;
and Churchill’s line in his Rosciad, to the effect that

“Common sense stood trembling at the door,”

is a plagiarism from George Alexander Stevens’s ‘Distress upon

Distress; or Tragedy in True Taste.’ This is more of “cabbage,” and less
of coincidence, than the line in one of the ‘Roxburgh Ballads’ anent
tailors, wherein we find an allusion in the phrase “turn up my ten toes,”
which is, as nearly as possible, a translation of part of the ladies’ threat in
the ‘Lysistra’ of Aristophanes. Altogether a volume might be filled with
examples to prove that poetry and tailoring have one spirit in common.
But it is time to turn from poetry to prose, and come more nearly to
our subject “touching tailors.” We will take individually those whose
great deeds have shed glory on the craft. First on the roll of fame is noble
Hawkwood.
 SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, THE HEROIC
TAILOR.
“The dew of grace bless our new knight today.”

B F : Knight of Malta.

On the 10th day of August, 1668, Mr. Samuel Pepys passed a portion
of his morning at Goring House, the mansion of Lord Arlington, a
nobleman who conversed with him amicably, and introduced him to
other lords, with whom the gallant secretary prattled after his fashion, to
say nothing of the flattery and compliments paid him by Lord Orrery. In
the afternoon we find him at Cooper’s, the miniature painter’s, who was
painting the portrait of that excellent lady Mrs. Pepys. The portrait was
excellent in every way, save that it was not like Mr. Pepys’s wife, and
that she wore a blue garment, which he could not bear. However, the
courteous husband paid £38. 3s. 4d. for the picture, crystal, and case, that
he might, as he prudently says, be out of the painter’s debt; and
thereupon he adds:—“Home to supper, and my wife to read a ridiculous
book I bought today of the History of the Taylors’ Company.”
The title of the book which Mrs. Pepys read aloud to her husband, and
which is a book that a lady might well blush to read either aloud or to
herself, runs as follows:—‘The Honour of the Merchant Taylors; wherein
is set forth, the noble arts, valiant deeds, and heroic performances of
Merchant Taylors in former ages; their honourable loves and knightly
adventures, their combating of foreign enemies, and glorious successes
in honour of the English nation; together with their pious acts and large
benevolences, their building of publick structures, especially that of
Blackwell Hall, to be a market-place for the selling of woollen cloaths.
Written by William Winstanley. London, 1668, 8vo. With the head of Sir
Ralph Blackwell, with a gold chain, arms of London on the right, and of
the Merchant Taylors on the left.’
Just twenty years later another volume was printed with nearly a
similar title. The alleged object was to give a biography of the renowned
tailor and soldier, Sir John Hawkwood; and for this reason we will give
the later work priority of notice. There will be amusement, if not