“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.”—Lutheran Tailor.
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.