It is worth recording that this rather high-toned chaplain Smirk, son of Smirk the Tailor, came under the censure and the scissors of the scrupulous Master of the Revels. This delicate official could tolerate the Smirks of Etherege, but when Shadwell exhibited one with something like sincerity dragging after his faults, the whole town, ay, and the court too, cried out shame! The wisdom of our ancestors does not appear to match with the assurance which affects to give warranty of it.
To turn from poetry to prose, I have to remark that Ingulph, the Abbot of Croyland, who wrote the pleasant story of his monastery, appears to me to have been (possibly) a tailor’s son. The good old man does not indeed say as much, but he intimates that he was a cockney of humble origin; and, if “vous êtes orfèvre, Monsieur Josse,” have a significance, why something of the same sort may be detected in the phrases and, I may add, in the deeds of the Chronicler of Croyland.
Ingulph was a Westminster boy and an Oxford scholar. Speaking of his studies at the latter place, he says:—“After I had made progress beyond most of my fellows in mastering Aristotle, I also clothed myself down to the heels with the first and second rhetoric of Tully. On growing to be a young man, I loathed the narrow means of my parents, and daily longed with the most ardent desire to leave my paternal home, and sighed for the palaces of kings and princes, to clothe myself in soft or pompous raiment.” If Molière’s Monsieur Josse was discovered to be a goldsmith by the setting of his criticism, we may say that Ingulph was of a tailorish origin by the cut of his phrases. And so, as I have said, of his acts: in these there is a strong redolence of what the vulgar call “cabbage.” For instance, when “trustworthy reports” were made by local valuers of land and property, in order that the same should be taxed, and the said valuers visited Croyland to that intent, Ingulph thus exultingly records what took place:—“Those persons showed a kind and benevolent feeling towards our monastery, and did not value the monastery at its true revenue, nor yet at its exact extent; and thus, in their compassion, took due precautions against the future exactions of the kings, as well as other burdens, and with the most attentive benevolence made provision for our welfare.” It is curious to see how robbing the king’s exchequer in favour of a monastery is called attentive benevolence; how fraudulent returns are spoken of as “trustworthy reports;” and how the Lord Abbot of Croyland, the personal favourite of William the Conqueror, cheated the master who confided in him, and practically illustrated the text, “Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.”
Till a very recent period it was the invariable custom, whenever a Frenchman appeared on our stage, to represent him ridiculously attired. This was originally done out of revenge for an affront put upon us by Catherine de’ Medici; who, instigated by the Duc de Guise, had dressed up her buffoons at a court entertainment, and called them English milords. Elizabeth made a capital remark when she was told of this insult. She called aloud, in full court, to the French Ambassador, that when these French buffoons were declared in presence of her own Ambassador, Lord North, to be English noblemen, that envoy ought to have told those who witnessed the unseemly entertainment, that the tailors of France who had so mimicked the costume of her great sire Henry VIII. should have better remembered the habiliments of that great King, since he had crossed the sea more than once with warlike engines displayed, and had some concern with the people there.
The most fortunate, perhaps I ought to say the most successful, tailor of very recent times, was Mr. Brunskill, whose seat of operations was at Exeter. No provincial, and not above one metropolitan, tailor ever realized such a fortune as he did: it was realized not by luck, but by labour. For the first seven years that he was in business on his own account he worked seventeen hours a day. And if he went to church on Sundays, he plied his needle none the less actively during the other hours of that day. This is the worst feature in the case; but he probably entertained a religious respect for that maxim of St. Augustine which tells us, “qui laborat, orat.” It was his boast that he was the only man in Exeter who could ride forty miles a day and cut out work for forty journeymen besides. This assiduity had its reward, and Brunskill’s business soon returned above £25,000 annually. Of course young heirs and youths rich only in present hopes resorted to him for loans; and Brunskill was as successful as a money-broker as he was in his other vocation. Cent. upon cent. reared the structure of his edifice of fortune; and long before a quarter of a century had elapsed since he commenced his career, he was proprietor of Polsloe Park, and, if not a ’squire himself, training his three lads to take station with ’squires. In the meantime, constant labour was his dear delight, and he was ever at his board or his bank, making men by a double process,—some, by dressing their persons; some, by dressing their credit,—and, in either case, with good security for prompt payment. He was thus hard at work up to one Monday night not many months ago, and on the following Thursday morning he was a dead man. Corporal Trim himself might here have found a theme whereon to deeply philosophize. Leaving that profitable occupation to our old friend the Corporal, let us look at the half pleasant, half stern realities of the case. Brunskill left three sons: to the two younger he bequeathed £10,000 apiece; to the eldest, £200,000 and Polsloe Park. The younger may wear their crape with satisfaction, and the eldest heir may bless the needle which pricked him out so pretty a condition. His sire has made him first gentleman of a future race of county ’squires; and I beg to assure heirs to come in after times from this peculiar source, that they will have less to be ashamed of than have those noble gentlemen and ladies who descend from concubines of kings, and who exist upon the wages of their first mother’s pollution.
We have now considered both the patron and his flock; let us now see how the latter have been treated by the lively poets who have “fine-drawn” them in immortal verse.
THE TAILORS MEASURED BY THE POETS.
“Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori.”—Horace.
Oh, Thersites, good friend, how scurvily hast thou been dealt with at the hands of man! Thou art emphatically un homme incompris, but thou art not therefore un homme méprisable. The poets have comprehended thee better than the people; and Homer himself has no desire to prove thee the coward and boaster for which thou art taken by the world on Homeric authority. I think that Ulysses, with whom, in the ‘Iliad,’ Thersites is brought in contact, is by far the greater brute of the two. The husband of Penelope is cringing to the great, and cruel to the lowly. He appears much less fitted for a king than for a Poor-law Commissioner. He unmercifully smites the deformed Thersites with his sceptre; but why?—because the latter, so far from being a coward, had had the courage to attack Agamemnon himself before the whole assembled Greeks. He is ridiculed for the tears extorted from him by pain and shame; and yet weeping, among the heroes of Greek epic and tragic poetry, is indulged in on all occasions by the bravest of the brave. There is nothing that these copper-captains do more readily or more frequently, except lying, for which they exhibit an alacrity that is perfectly astounding. The soft infection will run through two whole armies, and then the universal, solemn shower rises into the majesty of poetry; but when our poor, ill-treated friend drops a scalding tear, in his own solitary person, it is then bathos! I concede that he talked too much; but it was generally close to the purpose, and fearless of results. His last act was one of courage. The semi-deified bully Achilles, having slain Penthesilea, cried like a school-boy at his self-inflicted loss; and Thersites, having laughed at him for his folly, paid for his bold presumption with his life. There is another version of his death, which says that, the invincible son of Thetis having visited the dead body of the Amazon with unnatural atrocities, the decent Thersites reproached him for his unmanly conduct, and was slain by him in rage at the well-merited rebuke. Shakspeare, who did all things perfectly, makes of Thersites a bold and witty jester, who entertains a good measure of scorn for the valiant ignorance of Achilles. The wit of the latter, with that of his brother chiefs, lies in their sinews; and their talk is of such a skim-milk complexion that we are ready to exclaim, with bold Thersites himself, “I will see you hanged like clotpoles ere I come any more to your tents; I will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of fools.”