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