The vestiarian profession has always been ill-treated by the world. Men have owed much, and in more senses than one, to their tailors, and have been accustomed to pay their debt in sneers and railleries—often in nothing else. The stage character of the tailor is stereotyped from generation to generation; his goose is a perennial pun; and his habitual melancholy is derived to this day from the flatulent diet on which he will persist in living—cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest—a mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in a gibe at his trade:
'Thou liest, thou thread,
Thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail;
Away thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant;
Or I shall so bemete thee with thy yard,
As thou shalt think on prating while thou liv'st!'
All this is not a very favourable specimen of the way in which the stage holds the mirror up to nature. We may suppose that a certain character of effeminacy attached to a tailor in that olden time when he was the fashioner for women as well as men; but now that he has no professional dealings with the fair sex but when they assume masculine 'habits,' it is unreasonable to continue the stigma. In like manner, when the cloth belonged to the customer, it was allowable enough to suspect him of a little amiable weakness for cabbage; but now that he is himself the clothier, the joke is pointless and absurd. Tailors, however, can afford to laugh, as well as other people, at their conventional double—or rather ninth, for at least in our own day they have wrought very hard to elevate their calling into a science. The period of lace and frippery of all kinds has passed away, and this is the era of simple form, in which sartorial genius has only cloth to work upon as severely plain as the statuary's marble. It is true, we ourselves do not understand the 'anatomical principles' on which the more philosophical of the craft proceed, nor does our scholarship carry us quite the length of their Greek (?) terminology; but we acknowledge the result in their workmanship, although we cannot trace the steps by which it is brought about.
Very different is the plan now from what it was in the days of Shemus nan Snachad, James of the Needle, hereditary tailor to Vich Ian Vohr, when men were measured as classes rather than as individuals, and when a cutter had only to glance at the customer to ascertain to which category he belonged.
'You know the measure of a well-made man? Two double nails to the small of the leg'——
'Eleven from haunch to heel, seven round the waist. I give your honour leave to hang Shemus, if there's a pair of shears in the Highlands that has a baulder sneck than her ain at the camadh an truais (shape of the trews).' And so the thing was done, without tape or figures, without a word of Greek or anatomy! However, the anatomical tailors we shall not meddle with for the present, because we do not understand their science; nor with the Greek tailors, because we fear to take the liberty; nor with the Hebrew tailors, because we are only a Gentile ourselves. Our object is to draw attention to the doings of an individual who interferes with no science but his own, and who patronises exclusively his mother-tongue, which is not Hebrew, but broad Scotch.
This individual is Mr Macdonald, a near neighbour of ours, who, about eighteen years ago, listened with curiosity, but not with dread, to the clamorous pretensions of the craft to which he belonged. At that time, every man had a 'new principle' of his own for the sneck of the shears, some theoretical mode of cutting, which was to make the coat fit like the skin. Our neighbour, who had a practical and mechanical, rather than a speculative head, resolved not to be behind in the race of competition, but to proceed in a different way. 'It is all very well,' thought he, 'to talk of principles and theories; but with the requisite apparatus, the human figure may be measured as accurately as a block of stone;' and accordingly he set to work, not to invent a theory, but to construct a machine. This machine, though exhibited some time ago in the School of Arts, and received with great favour, we happened not to hear of till a few days ago; but a visit to our neighbour puts it now in our power to report that his apparatus does much more, as we shall presently explain, than measure a customer.
The machine consists of three perpendicular pieces of wood, the centre one between six and seven feet high, with a plinth for the measuree to stand upon. The wood is marked from top to bottom with inches and parts of an inch, and is furnished with slides, fitting closely, but movable at the pleasure of the operator. When the customer places himself upon this machine, standing at his full height, he has much the appearance of a man suffering the punishment of crucifixion, only his arms, instead of being extended, hang motionless by his sides, with the fingers pointed. A slide is now run up between the victim's legs, to give the measurement of what is technically called the fork; while others mark in like manner upon the inch scale, the position of the knees, hips, tips of the fingers, shoulder, neck, head, &c. When the operator is satisfied that he has thus obtained the accurate admeasurement of the figure, in its natural position when standing erect, the gentleman steps from the machine, and turning round, sees an exact diagram, in wood, of his own proportions.
This instrument, it will be seen, is very well adapted for the object for which it was intended; but it would, nevertheless, have escaped our inspection but for the other purposes of observation to which it has been applied by the ingenious inventor. He has measured in all about 5000 adults, registering in a book the measurement of each, with the names written by themselves. Among the autographs, we find that of Sir David Wilkie in the neighbourhood of the names of half a dozen American Indians. Here would be a new branch of inquiry for those who are addicted to the study of character through the handwriting. With such abundant materials before them, they would doubtless be able to determine the height and general proportions of their unseen correspondents. In the article of height, many men correspond to the minutest portion of an inch; but in the other proportions of the figure, it would seem that no two human beings are alike. So great is the disparity in persons of the same height, that the trunk of an individual of five feet and a half, is occasionally found to be as long as that of a man of six feet. In fact, Mr Macdonald, in an early period of his measurements, was so confounded by the difference in the proportions, that he at once came to the conclusion, that our population is made up of mixed tribes of mankind.
In the midst of all this diversity, the question was, What were the proper proportions? or, in other words, What proportions constituted a handsome figure? and here our vestiarian philosopher was for a long time at a loss. At length, however, he took 300 measurements, without selection, including the length of the trunk, of the head and neck, and of the fork, and adding them all together, struck the average: from which it resulted, that the average head and neck gives 10½ inches; trunk, 25 inches; and fork, 32 inches; making the whole figure, from the crown of the head to the sole of the shoe, 5 feet 7½ inches. The word we have italicised is the drawback: a tailor measures with the shoes on; and Mr Macdonald can only approximate to the truth when he deducts half an inch for the sole, and declares the average height of our population to be five feet seven inches. On this basis, however, he constructed a scale of beauty applying to all heights: If a man of 5 feet 7 inches give 10½ inches for head and neck, 25 for trunk, and 31½ for fork, what should another give, of 6 feet, or any other height? The approximation of a man's actual measurement to this rule of three determines his pretensions in the way of symmetry; and the inventor of the shibboleth has found it so far to answer, that a figure coming near the rule invariably pleases the eye, and gives the assurance of a handsome man. Independently of this advantage, a man of such proportions has great strength, and is able to withstand the fatigue of violent exercise for a longer period than one less symmetrically formed.