At the end of an old medical book which I have in my possession, are the following, among other advertisements:—"The new Plannet no Plannet , or the Earth no Wandring Star. Here, out of the principles of divinity, philosophy, &c. the earth's immobility is asserted, and Copernicus, his opinion, as erroneous, &c. fully refuted, by Alexander Ross, in quarto."
"A Recantation of an Ill-led Life, or a discovery of the highway law, as also many cautelous admonitions, and ful instructions how to know, shun, and apprehende a thiefe, most necessary for all honest travellers to peruse, observe, and practice; written by John Clavel, gent."
ENGLISH FASHIONS.
Our constant changes of habit were the subject of ridicule at home and abroad, even at an early period. Witness the ancient limner's jest in 1570, who, being employed to decorate the gallery of the Lord Admiral Lincoln with representations of the costumes of the different nations of Europe, when he came to the English, drew a naked man, with cloth of various colours lying by him, and a pair of shears held in his hand, as in rueful suspense and hesitation; or the earlier conceit, to the same effect, of "Andrew Borde of Physicke Doctor," alias "Andreas Perforatus," who, to the first chapter of his "Boke of the Instruction of Knowledge," (1542,) prefixed a naked figure, with these lines:—
"I am an Englishman, and naked I stande here,
Musing in minde what rayment I shal weare:
For nowe I wil weare this, and now I will weare that—
And now I will weare I cannot telle whatt."