Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847

I would no more willingly part with the habit that gives me personal ease, and is familiar with all my movements, than I would with that metaphorical habit of mind, of thoughts and feeling, that makes the continuing identity of my being. I say identity, for a man of any character must identify himself with his clothes: by wear they acquire somewhat more than a likeness. No man can ride the same horse daily for five years, but the two animals will in some strange way give out to each other something of their natures – there is sure to be a resemblance. So is it with our clothes. There is an old caricature of Bunbury's, – "The Country Club" – in which this truth is shown. You know you could put every man's hat upon his head, though they are all hung on pegs. And this is surely a most characteristic kind of portraiture. I should as much think of setting up the painted likeness of a deceased friend or dearer relative as a sign to a pot-house for the Saracen's head, as I would give his suit of clothes, at least in the shape in which he left them, to a mumper that should go begging in them. Would it not be an offence, that the noble air of freedom and of sentient responsibility they have acquired, should be doomed to contract in damp and unwholesome decay, the look of degradation and drooping melancholy of a vicious meanness, retaining, at the same time, that something of the departed, which, by its presence, seems to connect him with an abominable deterioration? Let the clothes be buried with the man, lest your friend's very effigies be seen in low haunts and vile places. For you can steep them in no dye of a Lethe that will wash away the remembrances, the likenesses they have acquired. Would you have the apron of sanctity transferred, by ill-advised gift, from a defunct archbishop to the boddice of an indecent figurante? Detestable notions these – that nothing should be lost, and all turned to use! What use of any thing is better than that one which keeps feelings, affections, respect, entire! Were I a modern iconoclast, I would rather burn the petticoats of "our Lady of Loretto," than transfer them to a still lower puppet-show. I had rather say for ever with the Mayor of Garratt, "Stand back, you gentleman without a shirt," than present him with one of my grandfather's wearing. When a boy, I always used to think it a painful sight to see cast clothes hung out on poles or lines, and extending half across a street, blown to and fro with the winds, like ghosts affecting the show and motion of vitality, undergoing their purification in an upper aerial purgatory, preparatory to their metempsychosis, uncertain if they should adopt unto themselves a bodily being of a higher or a lower order. To hang the coat seemed very like hanging the man.

Pythagoras was the first man, says history, that wore breeches. When he hung up the shield of Euphorbus in the temple of Juno, to show that he had been Euphorbus, did he suspend his breeches also? He probably did, disliking any meaner transmigration for them; for we are told his fashion was not followed until some generations had passed. The modern Pythagorean would send them to the pawnbrokers.

The fine idea of Lucian, that our shadows will be our accusers, might very properly be transferred to coats and inexpressibles; for, besides that they might witness of our whereabouts and of our doings, they might witness of our ingratitude in casting them off, – wearing our old friends thread-bare, and then throwing them off when they have most singularly accommodated themselves to all our strange ways, – of sending them, as the unfeeling do the high-mettled racer to the cart, to other service to which they are but ill-fitted. The wearer of another man's coat is guilty of a kind of larceny; he does more than steal from the person, he in one sense steals the person itself! At least, he should be held responsible for all that has been done in the coat, and that on the principle of taxation, as the law comes not on the tenant gone off, but upon the land. Better that a man should make a museum of his apparel, than part with it out of the family of which it so properly forms a part.

A gallery of suspended braces might represent one's ancestors, equally with the be-wigged portraits that seem to lay their hands upon their hearts, and say from their frames, "Posterity, I begot you." A breeches-gallery might with much less expense serve the same purpose; for if these articles have not fittingly belonged to posterity, it is notorious that they have most fittingly belonged to something very like it. Do you not think, Eusebius, that these suspension breeches, the idea of which is worthy the Shandean philosophy, would be very expressive of family character, and nicely distinguish unseemly interpolation; and that a genealogical wardrobe-gallery would become an object of pride, and most proper appendage to the family seat? It could no more be doubted to what race and blood apparel would justly belong, than to what shoulders certain heads must belong – which illustration reminds me of that saying of Bishop Bonner's to Henry VIII. who threatened to cut off the head of every Frenchman in his power, should Francis I. take the life of the bishop? "True, sire," said he with a smile, "but I question, if any of their heads would fit my shoulders as well as that I have on." So would the family-fit be no bad test of the true character and vitality in the genealogical tree.

I suppose that, by your question – How I came to be a sloven – you would have me throw off my old habits, and put on new – and perhaps, in your satirical innuendo, attack more than apparel, which we abuse by metaphor, when we term ill manners "bad habits!" Did I tell you how ingeniously our gay and jocund friend and poetical satirist defended himself in encounter of wit with a bantering opponent? "How do we know," said he, "but that our vices may be our persecuted virtues." "Slovenry," Eusebius, is a persecuted virtue. It is a tone and virtue that unbends, loosens the stiffness of the social body, liberates it from the strict tie of an awkward formality, and is to the whole of society what variety is in the dress in an individual – a happy relief, without which there would be too much monotony. The philosopher who made his bow to the jewelled and richly dressed man, and thanked him for the sight, and the trouble he took in putting on and bearing such a costly suit, should have been thanked, in his turn, for acting the foil, the contrast, which made the finery so conspicuous. If we were all dressed up kings and queens – were all the world to wear a lord mayor's livery, there would be no show to see. It is the intermixture, the great variety, that makes the exhibition, which is only then complete when it has a little dash of slovenry. What a sorry picture it would be that should have all bright colours! the finest carnation is best set off with a little adjacent umber. You would no more wish to see people in the streets all dressed alike, than you would wish to see the streets all alike, and every house like another. Nature dresses not after this one millinery. In the richest corn field, it is not every blade, and ear, and stalk, that is equally broad, full, and straight. Some have a kind of slovenly lying off from others, a grace, the very purposed gift of Nature, to entice the eye to a more curious and nice selection, whereby to discover the infinite degrees of beauty, that all united make the whole perfection. The precision of the tall and upright stalk is the more strongly marked in its strength, by the decoration of its neighbour – and how beautifully do a few clustered together plume off their individual irregularity into a graceful shape! Has not the tangled hedge its own beauty even when it "putteth forth disordered twigs?" You would not bear all pruned to one smooth fashion. The finery of Nature's robes makes but a small part of her wardrobe; she hath her ordinary wear, and even when she putteth on her mantle of the richest green, she trims it sparingly – and that for the most part with a loose lacery of unobtrusive jasmine and vine-weed. And the nature that bids all the garniture of earth thus grow variously in richness, in moderation, and in a sweet and humble disorder, putteth it into man's mind; for he is doomed to dress himself, so as to follow her law; – and thus it is, that in any given number of persons you shall see some few endowed with this natural gift and grace of slovenry. And that careless, modest, unassuming part in the arabesque ornament of life, you and I, Eusebius, are intended to perform. One character for the harlequin, another for the clown, and we must have the lean and slippered pantaloon – and there must be some one besides, my good friend, to play the fool too, or the stage will not be well filled, nor the comedy of life well performed, nor the spectators well pleased.

Take, Eusebius, which part you please, – you will ultimately fall into your natural character, and however you may shift a little with age, you will ever have a hankering after "one more last appearance" in motley. I doubt if the daily moving scene would be perfect without the beggar's rags. Their loose uncared for freedom, the independence of an escape beyond the limits of poverty, which, says the satirist, makes men ridiculous, floating in the wind or drooping in the rain, alike defying and disregarding the better or the worse of fortune, have their moral as well as pictorial use and dignity too in the panorama. The beggar's negligence is the running commentary on the rich man's anxieties. All is right in its place; you have only to look and admire the show. The grandest cathedrals, with their ornamented towers or spires seeking heaven as their own, are not always the worse for a contiguous poverty of humble dwellings, which they do but seem to take under their sacred protection; and thus the low elevates still more the great. You and I may be well content, by the lowness of our apparel, to magnify the magnificent; only, I confess that when I find myself standing as a foil to one of our rough-haired, be-whiskered and bearded fops, I do sometimes feel inclined to throw a nut in his way to see if he be a monkey or a man. One would not wish to be showman to the brute. The contempt of the fop is of little moment; and here I cannot but think Anacharsis was wrong, when he proposed to himself to leave Greece on account of the derision cast upon him for his dress.

I admire your offering the example of Aristippus, as an inducement to quit the character of the sloven. You say he accepted a rich robe; but you must remember that the wiser Plato refused it. Besides, it was in the philosophy of Aristippus to take either part, and to appear fop or sloven as his humour pleased him, or convenience led him. "Omnis Aristippum decuit color," says Horace; and let me suggest that color must have meant, not color vitæ, (or if it so be, it is a metaphor from the thing,) but the colour of his cloth – black, perhaps, turned brown – seedy. He was certainly one to "cut his coat according to his cloth." Diogenes in his rags and his tub was a coxcomb – one would not be like him; he tricked up his poverty, to be observed, and looked at, and admired, quite as much as any other coxcomb would trick out his fashion for the eye. When he desired Alexander to step aside, not to interpose his person between him and the sun, it was but a self-magnifying vanity, that his filthy rags might be the more conspicuous and set off in the splendour of a new light, as conceited religionist sects have done, calling aloud for the finger of scorn to point at the filthy rags of their own flesh and blood; vilifying their bodily man, that their unfleshed and spiritual selves might be seen by that glass through which they bid you look, to rise above and shine in the new light of their own glorification – an idea which they have borrowed from those picture-cherubs, who, only heads and wings, seem altogether to have dropped their bodies and enveloped themselves in a smoky and cloudy vapour peculiarly their own. And truly, Eusebius, I am apt to agree with you, when we see these congregated saints of the New Calendar, and to join in their personal vilification, and to think that merely heads and wings might offer a more salutary odour of sanctity than that which you say you have ever found too pungent in the "Rag Fair" of their New-Paradise Row.

And your Aristippus was not quite to my mind; for though there was a show of wisdom in his carelessness, it was the very show that was displeasing, and the easy putting on of other men's tastes and opinions, as if he himself was as changeable as they. Does not the confirmed sloven appear to be actuated by a nobler kind of philosophy, who, with a soul bent, as man's should be, on durability, resisting to the utmost a common, degrading, and visible mutability, and seeing how changeable a thing fashion of any kind is, and how unworthy a thing it is to become to-morrow utterly unlike what he is to-day, and to be to-day what he was not yesterday, despises these shiftings and changes, – these fittings on and takings off, – these ever-varying metamorphoses that so unman him, and rests with a firm disregard of appearance, which, if unsteady, must be false to the character that is or should be within him; and if it be not false, is but the greater shame, and fixes the instability upon his mind? Is it not a kind of blot upon the fair profession of respect and reverence, to stoop and put on the livery of a fashion which leads you up to the portraits of your ancestors, and bids you turn to ridicule their attire, and perhaps makes you laugh at the father who begat you? – or subject yourself to a like disgrace, by imagining them to be looking down from the walls in contempt upon yourself, and that the fading colours blush for you? I have heard a neighbour tell of a friend of his, who had done great things, in a worldly sense, for his family, and who, wishing to stand well in the eyes of his posterity, with an affectionate reminiscence had his portrait taken in his wedding-suit. But after this, going to a play, and seeing the counterpart upon the stage, he bethought him that such might be the case with his suit, – that it might be sold, and go to the theatrical wardrobe: so, as he said, to save his posterity the disgrace of casting contempt or ridicule upon one who had done so much for them, he had the dress painted out, and left it in his will, that the real wedding-suit should be buried with him. Indeed, it is recorded of a gentleman about a century ago, who, having a very goodly show of ancestors, was so shocked at the unfashionable appearances of his Vandykes, that he had the fashionable bob-wigs of the day put upon them all.

And this, Eusebius, reminds me to speak of painters, who in nothing are more at a loss than in what manner to dress their sitters. They have almost all come to the conviction at last, that a kind of slovenly undress is the best, and are sure to adopt it, unless by particular desire, and to commemorate official consequence, the robes and chain of a lord mayor are required, at an extra charge, or the solemn look of one who is nobody must be removed from asinine insignificance by a great quantity of fur, or a red curtain suspended from a marble column in the open air. Sculptors take a bolder step, and, with a taste that does credit to their sagacity, give the bust, without hesitation, a slovenly dignity, – simply throw an old huckaback towel round the chest and over the shoulder, and trust to the features of the man and the material of the marble to add weight and consequence. The historical painter would be worse off still, had he not by common consent a kind of sovereignty over dress. His greatest desire is, upon all occasions, entirely to discard it, as much as may be to paint the nude, as if there were no truth but naked truth. The trim suit is his aversion; the wardrobe for his lay figures offers but a curious assemblage of rags.

It would be difficult to learn how to grapple with this Proteus of dress – mutable fashion. I am told that our dresses, male and female, were extremely ridiculous in the eyes of the French, when we visited the continent after the Peace. The Persian visitors were astonished that we wore our hair in the wrong place – on the head instead of the chin. There is almost a slovenly simplicity which alone properly imitates the natural ease and grace of unconfined nature. The farther we depart from it, we go but back again to the rude, uncultured barbarian. Sir Joshua somewhere says, that if a tattooed Indian and a powdered and buttoned man of fashion should meet in the street, he that laughed first would be the real savage.

I am not, Eusebius, contending against the advice of Polonius,

"Costly your habit as your purse can buy."

You should, however, remember to whom that advice was given, – to the courtier Laertes, that "man about town" in Denmark.

Your quotation will not, be assured, fit me, and, I suspect, not yourself either, with a new suit. We must play our parts, and dress accordingly. For, as the old courtier adds —

"The apparel oft proclaims the man."

I would have your courtier, who is but a sort of palace furniture, dress to suit, and make perfect the millinery and upholstery about him. You say that the being a good dresser made the fortune of Sir Walter Raleigh, when he threw his costly paletot before the feet of Queen Elizabeth. True; but that trick is not to be played twice. You are more likely to enter the palace like the boy Jones, than through any such Eusebian gallantry. And what should you or I do there? You would make but a sorry Aristippus, wearing your court suit, indeed, "with a difference;" for there is not a tailor that would not mismeasure you in your unsteady postures; and you would make them worse by your uncontrolled laugh at your new position.

I am no greater sloven than yourself. You have, in fact, therein the advantage of me by a greater laxity. You could not make a Mantalini. But – not to think of that extravagance – let me remind you of a kind of "well-dressed man" whom I have often heard you say you should like to trip up and lodge in a gutter. It is one who is always well-dressed, always the same, whatever the temperature – one whom rain never wets, suns never make to fade, whom dirt will not splash. In summer he never looks hot. Dust will not attach to his boots or to his coat. He walks about, and always alone. He is quite out of the pale and contact of friendship, as if the invisible creatures so admirably described in the "Rape of the Lock" were with invisible brushes ever busying themselves about his male attire. You never see him accost or be accosted by man or woman. His shadow, if he has one, must smooth the dust upon which it falls. There is no wear and tear in him, nor in any thing about him. His voice, if utterance he hath, must be of a poor monotony, of a preservative tone, and without growth. Whence he comes or whither he goes, is an undivulged secret. Does he undress? He is so unchangeable, so ever the same neat, well-dressed, unsoiled, and unsoilable man. He never was in a chrysalis state. He must have been beat out of some tailor's brains with a goose, and come into the world ready dressed, and unborn of woman. However fashion changes, it is all the same, he is never out of it. Like dissolving views, he slides unnoticeably from costume to costume, without one article about him being ever newer or older, and you never can tell where the difference is. Changes must take place, yet in some charmed invisible manner. He is like a man made by the magical words of Pancrates the Memphian out of a broomstick, and set walking about, and as if the Encrates tailor had forgotten the charm to reduce him again; and so he had walked about ever since.

While I thus laugh in the glory of slovenliness, I must refrain from entering upon a wider field, – woman's influences in the full dressed world. – Let them enjoy their prerogative undisturbed. As we shall not undergo a feminine metamorphosis, we are not likely to suffer, from their amiable dress vagaries, unless they should return to some of their older fashions, in which case, we must alter our very houses to please them; as was done for Isabel of Bavaria, the luxurious consort of Charles VI. of France, who, when he kept court at Vincennes, was compelled to call in the architect, and have all the doors of the palace made higher, to admit the head-dresses of the Queen and her ladies. Yet we need not laugh, for, Eusebius, if the trunk hose should come into vogue again, our doorways must be widened. That would not be so bad as a return on our side of the question to a tight fit, on which condition every limb was in misery, that, to think of, will reconcile you to our loose indifference. What a monstrous contrast of extremes has been exhibited, from the tight pantaloon, such as we see it in some old pictures, to the great breeches worn in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth! In the "Pedigree of the English gallant," an account is given of a man, whom the Judges accused of wearing breeches contrary to law, (a law was made against them.) His defence of himself is curious. "He drawed out of his sloops the contents," viz., a pair of sheets, two table-cloths, ten napkins, four shirts, a brush, a glass, and a comb, with night-caps, and other things, saying, "Your worships may understand, that because I have no safer a store-house, these pockets do serve me for a room to lay up my goods in, and though it be a straight prison, yet it is big enough for them, for I have many things of value yet within it." He was discharged, as he should have been, with his merchandise, and allowed to trade freely on his own bottom. Hudibras carried some such a cupboard. Small must have been the population, when these inexpressibles, great inexpressibles, gallanted with the ladies' large hoop farthingales. A few pairs must have occupied no small space. A courtship in those days must have resembled a siege, where the principal defence lay in the outworks, and the difficulty of approach was not a little enhanced by the encumbrances of the advancing party.

Who was the first coxcomb? Was dress, in its origin, a modest or immodest appendage to the person; or rather when did it first cease to be merely a protection or concealment? Is love of ornament a natural virtue, or a superinduced vice? These are curious speculations. There is an old play I have somewhere read of, which represents our first parents in Paradise perfectly nude, and so were they exhibited, and in public, without shame. The subsequent acts introduced them dressed; and the last act, I believe, in the fashion of the day in which the play was acted. As all plays were then serious, was this representation a satire on coxcombry, and intended to exhibit the progress of personal degradation?

What does a man propose to himself when he goes to his tailor's? Is it to be clothed or adorned? Is it to hide a defect, that he may not appear worse than he is, or that he may appear better than he is? To attract observation or to escape it. Is the pride in dress, or in undress? Ingenious in self-deceit was the reply of the man reproved for the badness of his dress, "Oh every body knows me here;" and his reply when seen in the same suit far from his home, "Oh nobody knows me here." This was a true amateur; he loved slovenliness for its own sake. Few believe themselves so ill-made, as that the "dogs will bark at them." Even Richard III., who owned to his deformity, gets a little in love with himself, and thinks of adorning his person. "I do mistake my person all this while." He determines to act the exquisite.

"I'll be at charges for a looking-glass;
And entertain a score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body.
Since I have crept in favour with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost."

Or does the satirical and successful Richard merely laugh at your fop-wooers, and, proud of his own superiority, contemn them, by imagining their dress on his own person? One would really think, from the figures one sees, that there are people who dress purposely to spite the tailors, as there are those who are paid to be walking placards of recommendation.

The butcher who ran after the fat man, and stopped him crying, "Be so good, sir, as to say you buy your meat of me," was not more aware of the benefit of such a personal recommendation, than is our fashionable tailor. A well-made man, if he is in tolerable fashion, may be supplied with clothes, as I am credibly informed, for nothing but the merely notifying the makers. They are the decoy-ducks, excepting that, though they have fine feathers, they have no bills.

I am told that a fashionable tailor would be quite shy of an ill-made and vulgar looking customer; and generally charges his dislike in his bill, that he may lose him. I knew a portrait painter, that professed to decline, painting ugly people, upon that principle, and consequently his success was quite astonishing; every one he did paint was in better humour with himself, and was proud of his certificate of beauty when he named the artist. Were you and I, Eusebius, to presume to enter the saloon of a fashionable cutter, and order suits, they would be purposely so ill-made, that no one should suspect from whence they came. And we should ever wear them with a hitch of discomfort in some part or other. So that, were we to try our best at foppery, we could not now succeed. I have tried it upon various occasions, and convinced myself that I was not born to it, and certainly neither of us has acquired a second nature that any tailor would recognise. A tailor's man, like the poet, must be born with nature's fit, or nothing else will fit him, – "nascitur non fit." Some wear their limbs so loosely, that they move them as do those German toys, whose legs you see children jerk with a string. The best Sartorial artist can make nothing of them; they are a mockery even upon the manufacture of "journeymen," they "imitate nature so abominably."

How I came to be a sloven! Well, if I am a sloven, which I hardly know how to admit, and if I am a little in love with a kind of genteel slovenry, how came I by it? I did not take to it naturally, as you did, Eusebius; I caught it. And once caught, however we may upon occasions throw it off, it returns like an influenza, and becomes a continual habit. Few, indeed, are there who are not born with a contrary propensity, inheriting it from their mothers, whose preparations for the coming offspring were of the finest, the ventum textilem, as Apuleius calls it, – woven wind. Early, indeed, in his day of existence, is the little infant taught to show off, both his nude and his finery, and to hear the beauty of both commended. Thus is vanity engendered in the bud. You were a born genius, and exempt from the cradle from this visible mark of frailty. It was not so with me; I was an incipient fop before I could walk. And now I remember, Eusebius, that I sent you a letter some years ago, that should have answered, though perhaps imperfectly, your question. It was a "passage of autobiography," giving you an account of my first entrance at a public school, and how I was "breeched." How one Mr. Flight, after much tugging and pulling, by himself and foreman, did contrive to fit me into a pair of mouse-colour leather inexpressibles, – a good name for them, too, for I was hardly pressible in or out of them. Do you not remember my narration of the second time of putting them on, on my first morning at Winchester College, while the chapel bell was going, and I not yet fitted in; and how at last I did contrive to get some portion of me into them, and to fasten one button, and how I ran (but that word won't express the movement I made) breathless into the chapel, and on kneeling down, the button gave way to my shame, discomfort, and disgrace, exposure, ridicule. I might parody what the cock said to the fox,

"The master my defeat, and all the school-boys, see."

This was my first disgust at my own personal appearance. I hated my leathers; but they stuck to me, nevertheless, – my wardrobe contained nothing but leathers. I was like the dog that had killed his first lamb, forced to wear the skin, that became more odious every day. Here was a first distaste to dress. The fit was uncomfortable enough; but, besides, I was a subject of ridicule.

Time, with its wear and tear, took off the pride of my nether garment, and affected at length a kind of reconciliation between us. We fitted each other better, and both entered into a compact of mutual slovenry. Things won't last for ever, although, in those days, the trade did affect to manufacture a material they called "everlasting." As the quotation from an old song will show:

"And this my old coat, which is threadbare to-day,

May become everlasting to-morrow."

With new breeches come new manners, new ideas. Foppery takes growth again, though it is somewhat tender; struggles for life, but somehow or other acquires strength in the struggle. You contend against it, you wrestle with it, and, by a kind of enchantment, it becomes the tailor Antæus, and rises from every defeat a bigger man than ever. Behold me, let me stand for my picture, Ãtatis 18, Scholæ Wintoniensis alumnus. The date is at present unmentionable, – it will be found one of these days at the back of the canvass; behold me at the college gates, turning my back, for about my last holidays, upon those statuesque antique worthies, Sophocles, Euripides, Ãschylus. We have shaken hands finally with the sublime Longinus, preferring for the time a "sublime and beautiful" of our own, a butterfly of the first down. On second thoughts, I am not quite fit to stand there yet; I must describe my preliminary state. My boots, I rather think, my first boots, had come home the night before; boots then were no more like boots now, than are loose trousers to Mr. Flight's mouse-coloured tights. There was nearly the same process of pulling and tugging to get them on, and when once on, the revocare gradum was next to an impossibility. The leather, too, was of a more soaky oily kind, I suppose, and stuck like adhesive plaster, and drew like that medicated material. My boots were on, over-night, but no tug of war, no steam power of man or men – for we all tugged, and all steamed – could get them off. So it was determined I should sleep in them. It was very well so to determine, but sleep, as the negro said, "hab no massa," and would not obey. The bootmaker had advised and disappeared. It was soon found a just observation, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Sleep would not be bed ridden, for I was booted, possibly spurred; not even a classical charm would do,

"Heus, al quis long â sub nocte, puellæ,

Brachia nexa tenens ultro te somne repellit,

Inde veni."

Sleep was only the more obstinate, and preferred better society, or worse. Sleep has been too much petted by panegyrists, till he has learnt ill manners, lies down with the clown and the drunkard, for whom he leaves the presence and courting arms of suffering beauty, – such were my thoughts in those youthful classical and romantic days, and the above passage was most likely Latinised, – "shown up." Probatum est.

I must hasten on, for I am, though booted, not dressed yet. With a sickening sensation, at the earliest gray light of a midsummer dawn, did I put on my clothes – my bran-new, in which I was to go out into the sunshine of life. First, there was a pair of bright orange-colour plush breeches; a light buff waistcoat with a sham-red under; a coat – no – nor jacket nor coat, but a beautiful tailor-creation, a coatee; colour, green; buttons, shining metal. My boots were of the kind called tops.

Now I am ready to stand at the college gates for my picture, whip in hand, though a chaise is waiting for me and two more. My "copartners in exile" temporary, are waiting for me. They vociferate impatience. Is the portrait finished? Then complete it at your leisure, secundum artem. I am off. But while I have been standing for this portrait, the sun has risen; it is intensely hot. Heat of weather, tight boots, and swelling legs and limbs, are doing their work in and out of me. I am in a sad perspiration; and so off we go. We had reached the first mile-stone; then I discover I had left my purse behind me. Out I leap, run all the way back to "chamber," and away again to the chaise. I have at this moment a painful remembrance of that short pedestrian excursion – the heat intense, the orange-yellow plush flushing up into my face, the glare of buttons, the now-agony of my booted legs and feet, the difficulty of making the needful speed, and fear of the practical joke of leaving me behind – altogether these pains and discomforts put me into a kind of bilious fever, so that, if I did not loathe myself, I did most thoroughly my clothes. From that day I took a disgust to yellows, any thing glaring – abhorred my orange-plush: and I do not believe I had any symptom of foppery about me for three years after that memorable time. There is, indeed, a miniature portrait of me extant, taken about that period: it has a dash of powder in the hair, a rather smirking look; and there is a blue coat, metal buttons, the yellow waistcoat and red under; but I suspect these are not out of my wardrobe. They are from Mr Carmine's recipe-book of portrait costume, and may be found in page 6, lettered, "For very young gentlemen." I am pretty sure the dress, at least as it looks there, was not mine; for I remember well a remonstrance from my parent about that time, thus – "My son, you are too great a sloven."

I never quite recovered this; but there did come days of philandering, when I mended a little, and occasionally appeared thus. Behold me entering the ball-room – coat, blue, metal buttons; waistcoat, white dimity; nethers, black tights; pinkish silk stockings, highly-polished shoes, with small silver buckles; hair slightly powdered, and a slip of a tail that could flirt with either shoulder. You will see that there is a little of the sentimental cast in this: it was a doubtful dress, capable, by a very small change, of making the wearer a Hamlet or a Romeo for the night, as he might determine beforehand. I continued thus for a while respectable, and might have remained so to this day, but for an unfortunate taste which I acquired, and which threw me into irredeemable slovenry, in which I have remained ever since. In my idleness, which soon became, as Shakespeare so aptly calls it, "shapeless," I dabbled with paints, oils, and colours; and as with growing improvement I enlarged the dimensions of my operations from inch to the foot, and from foot to the yard, I was soon above my elbows in the unclean "materièl." There were no tube colours in those days; we had bladders. They were always bursting; and thus they bedaubed the hands, and the hands bedaubed the clothes; and amateurs were then Picts, up to their very eyes. Young as I was, I of course fancied myself a genius, and painted so large, and so largely, that a common-sized palette impeded my work. I enlarged that, and increased the quantity of my colours. I now mention a frequent disaster, that, being frequent, was quite enough to make a sloven of any one. Take the following scene: – A room such as could be spared me, not too large, in tolerable confusion; daubs in all states of disorder on the walls, against the walls, loose and strained, in all directions; large slabs for grinding colours – oils, turpentine, varnishes, &c. &c., all in that proper disorganisation to enable any youth of a tolerably slovenly person to set up for a genius. Now – it has taken me an hour to set my palette – look at it – here is a goodly row of colours mixed and intermixed after the recipe of Lionardo da Vinci, who would have added more, if paper, as he said, had not failed him. Here, however, are quite enough – and more than enough —satis superque– I look at the palette with extreme satisfaction – my canvass is on the easel – imagination begins to work – alas! too soon – I am not quite ready; I must put in a cup, that diluent oil – in another, turpentine; it is done. I am a little weary, and sit, down for a moment to rest, looking full on my canvass, and giving loose to my fancy – I rise, where is my palette – alas! I have sat upon it. I have had misfortunes in etching with aqua fortis – have been the "biter bit" – but here I was the painter painted. I do not know why the arts should be called Fine – "The Fine Arts" – unless it be in derision of the slovenliness which they occasion. Many a time have I sat upon my colours: a poetical friend once wrote me an ode upon it, and begged me to learn it by rote, as a kind of memoria technica, or charm of preservation. This I declined, not being good-humoured enough to admire any poetry not my own. But I remember upon one such occasion working off my vexation in a sonnet. And I recommend the recipe; you may successfully salve over many a sore distraction by soothing verse. There is a great charm in rhyme, or at least in searching for it, and versifying either altogether saves swearing, or enables you to throw it off very genteelly, and with a grace. I addressed the Fine Arts, whose epithet Fine I take to be given with a superstition of dread, as the old poets did the Furies, calling them Eumenides, thinking they should not fare the worse for giving them a good name; and as later times called the Fairies "the good people," lest they should punish poor innocents, and pinch o'nights. Read, Eusebius, my remonstrance to these personified, deified, and worshipped Fine Arts.

TO THE FINE ARTS

O, ye Fine Arts – why were ye once so Fine,
So dingy now, and working sore disaster;
As that my best of pigments look like plaster,
Compared with those of "Raphael the divine,"
That grow by time still brighter like old wine,
And seem to renovate a dead old master.
Better had I been born to wield a mallet,
A hod, a plough – than sables, hogs and fitches;
If ye must mock and mark your fool your valet,
With motley livery on my coats and breeches;
Making me sit upon my well-set palette,
With merry jeers the whilst I hear you titter,
And compliment me on my only sitter.

Look, Eusebius, as I dare to say you have often done, into the smudge of a colour-maker's shop, and imagine a personification of it in a young amateur aspirant. What a ludicrously serious Harlequin he is made! At last, in despair of acquirement of cleanliness, I plunged, as it were, into the very mud and smudge of paint, and did not hesitate to wipe a brush upon my sleeves.

Thus, I acquired a bad habit – and as I often had the fit to paint when my better dress was on, I now and then seized an unlucky moment of desire, and the better soon came to be the worse. By degrees I fell into a despair of mending; and so I became a confirmed sloven.