Valiant I know they can be; but I appeal to those who were witnesses to the exploits of Eliot's famous troop, whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed anything of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not show more of the melancholy valor of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged; that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits breathe?
Are they often great newsmongers?—I have known some few among them arrive at the dignity of speculative politicians; but that light and cheerful every-day interest in the affairs and goings-on of the world, which makes the barber[1] such delightful company, I think is rarely observable in them.
1: Having incidentally mentioned the barber in a comparison of professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence, or look upon it as an incivility done to them if I say, that in courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his. Indeed, so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court (where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at the universities), there are seven of them to whom I am personally known, and who never pass me without the compliment of the hat on either side. My truly polite and urbane friend Mr. A——m, of Flower-de-luce Court, in Fleet Street, will forgive my mention of him in particular. I can truly say that I never spent a quarter of an hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the agreeable discussions which are always going on there.
This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from the hypochondriacal or windy to the heroical or love-melancholy, has strangely omitted it. Shakspeare himself has overlooked it. "I have neither the scholar's melancholy (saith Jaques), which is emulation; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is politic; nor the lover's, which is all these:" and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, "nor the tailor's, which is," so and so, he comes to an end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own melancholy.
Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of bringing it in, in his Penseroso.
But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavor to ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant in people of this profession above all others.
And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel has been intrusted, to keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing remonstrance against those vanities which the absurd conversion of a memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to produce? Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the caballistic language of his order is said to have certain melancholy regions always open under his feet.—But waiving further inquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy.
I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some subordinate ones, viz.:
The sedentary habits of the tailor.—
Something peculiar in his diet.—