ENGLISH FASHIONS.
Our constant changes of habit were the subject of ridicule at home and abroad, even at an early period. Witness the ancient limner's jest in 1570, who, being employed to decorate the gallery of the Lord Admiral Lincoln with representations of the costumes of the different nations of Europe, when he came to the English, drew a naked man, with cloth of various colours lying by him, and a pair of shears held in his hand, as in rueful suspense and hesitation; or the earlier conceit, to the same effect, of "Andrew Borde of Physicke Doctor," alias "Andreas Perforatus," who, to the first chapter of his "Boke of the Instruction of Knowledge," (1542,) prefixed a naked figure, with these lines:—
"I am an Englishman, and naked I stande here,
Musing in minde what rayment I shal weare:
For nowe I wil weare this, and now I will weare that—
And now I will weare I cannot telle whatt."