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have only to beg that you will give me plenty of room, for I am a great walker, and I do not like to wear anything that constrains me." "But, Miss," exclaimed the poor fellow in great perplexity, "I never in my life measured a lady ; I- " and there he paused. "Are you not a lady's shoemaker?" was the query calmly put to him. "By no means, Miss," said he; "I am a leather-breeches maker, and I have come to take measure not of you, but Mr. Gilbert." The young lady became perplexed too, but she recovered her self-possession after a good common-sense laugh, and sent the maker of breeches to her grandpapa.

Rosemary-lane was not only of old, and under its name of Rag Fair, a great mart for cast-off garments, but especially, by some freak of ochlocratic fashion, for breeches. It has had the honour of being noticed by Pope as "a place near the Tower of London, where old clothes and frippery are sold ;" and, says Pennant, "the articles of commerce by no means belie the name. There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me to look on him with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man, ‘for,' says he, 'I have actually clothed him for fourteen pence."" And in the "Public Advertiser" for February 14, 1756, we read, as an incident of the locality "where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair," that "Thursday last one Mary Jenkins, who deals in old clothes in Rag Fair, sold a pair of breeches to an old woman for sevenpence and a pint of beer. Whilst they were drinking it in a public-house the purchaser, in unripping the breeches, found quilted in the waistband eleven guineas in gold, Queen Anne's coin, and a thirty-pound banknote, dated in 1729, which last she did not know the value of till after she sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl."

To go a little further back I may say that the Reformation had other results besides those usually recorded; thus that great event was no sooner accomplished than the brokers and sellers of old apparel took up their residence in Hounsditch, where their great

enemy, the Spanish Ambassador, had previously had a residence. Their locality was then "a fair field, sometime belonging to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, at Aldgate." "Where gott'st thou this coat, I mar❜le," says Wellbred to Brainworm, in Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour." "Of a Houndsditch man, Sir," answers Brainworm; one of the devil's near kinsmen, a broker."

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We have another portion of dress whose origin dates from a serious personage and from eventful times. I allude to that terror of gentlemen who do not possess that which frogs and properlybuilt men alone possess in common-namely, calves;-I allude, I say, to "pantaloons." This tight-fitting garment was once part of the official costume of the great standard-bearer of the Venetian Republic. He carried on his banner the Lion of St. Mark, and he was the Piantaleone, or Planter of the Lion, around whose glorious flag and tightly-encased legs the battle ever raged with greatest fury, and where victory was most hotly contended for. The tight parti-coloured legs of the tall Piantaleone were the rallying points of the Venetians. Where his thighs were upright, the banner was sure to be floating in defiance or triumph over them; and Venice may be said to have stood upon the legs of her Pantaloons. He who once saved states was subsequently represented as the most thoroughly battered imbecile of a pantomime. But therein was a political revenge. Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine represented different states of Italy, whose delight it was to pillory Venice by beating her nightly under the guise of the old buffoon "Signor Pantaloon." The dress has survived the memory of this fact, though the dress too is almost obsolete.

In the last paragraph there is the phrase "I say " interpolated, the use of which reminds me of a tailor-like comment made upon it. Erskine writing to Boswell, or Boswell to Erskine, I forget now which, remarks that "a sentence so clumsily worded as to require an 'I say' to keep it together, very much resembles, in my candid opinion, a pair of ill-mended breeches."

The article of bracce is suggestive of buttons; and touching these, I may observe that there is a curious law extant with

regard to them. It is, by Acts of Parliament passed in three reigns--William III., Anne, and George I.,-perfectly illegal for tailor to make, or mortal man to wear, clothes with any other buttons appended thereto but buttons of brass. This law is in force for the benefit of the Birmingham makers; and it further enacts, not only that, he who makes or sells garments with any but brass buttons thereto affixed, shall pay a penalty of forty shillings for every dozen, but that he shall not be able to recover the price he claims, if the wearer thinks proper to resist payment. Nor is the Act a dead letter. It is not many weeks since, that honest Mr. Shirley sued plain Mr. King for nine pounds sterling, due for a suit of clothes. King pleaded nonliability on the ground of an illegal transaction, the buttons on the garment supplied having been made of cloth, or bone covered with cloth, instead of gay and glittering brass, as the law directs. The judge allowed. the plea; and the defendant having thus gained a double suit without cost, immediately proceeded against the defendant to recover his share of the forty shillings for every dozen buttons which the poor tailor had unwittingly supplied. A remarkable feature in the case was, that the judge who admitted the plea, the barrister who set it up, and the client who profited by it, were themselves all buttoned contrary to law!

If I were writing an Encyclopædia of Trades, I would be as elaborate as Dryasdust on the manufacture of buttons of all sorts of metal, more or less costly; of wood, bone, ivory, horn, leather, paper, glass, silk, wool, cotton, linen, thread, flock, compressed clay, etc. etc.-so that both my readers and myself have a lucky escape. As the age however is statistical in its inclinations, I will save my credit by remarking that at Birmingham, the chief seat of button-manufacture, there are not less than five thousand persons engaged in the manufacture of buttons, and that half this number consists of women and children.

Having said this, I turn to a new chapter, wherein there will be something more of statistics, and something new about stockings.

STOCKINGS.

"Troth Master Inkpen, thou hast put thy foot

Into a pretty subject."-OLD PLAY.

WHEN the old trunkhose was found to fray the sacred epidermis of Christian kings and queens, the first fruits of a remedial discovery were presented for the benefit of the illustrious sufferers. Thus we hear that when stockings were first known in Europe, a Spanish grandee manifested his loyalty and love for his Queen, by presenting a pair to the Prime Minister, with a request that that official would place them at, if not on, the feet of his sovereign lady. The Minister was shocked at the grandee's assurance and lack of modesty. "Take back thy stockings," said he, "and name the thing not again; for know, O foolish Sir Duke, that the Queen of Spain has no legs!"

Our Henry III., less nice with regard to his own sister the Princess Isabella, did not scruple to present her with a pair of stockings of cloth, embroidered with gold.

These cloth hose went out of fashion in the reign of Elizabeth. Her silk-woman, Montague, had presented her Majesty with a pair of black knit silk stockings; and these were so pleasant to the legs of "England," that her Majesty discarded hot cloth for ever. She found double comfort in the first; namely, to herself, and further comfort that by adopting them she was encouraging a home-made article. The first pair of English-knit worsted stockings were worn by Elizabeth's Peer, "Proud Pembroke." They had been imitated from an Italian knit pair by William Rider, apprentice to Thomas Burdett, at the Bridge foot, opposite St. Magnus' Church; and

their presentation to Pembroke was, doubtless, profitable to the apprentice.

Disappointed love has been the cause of various dire effects, but I do not know that it ever caused effect so singular as when it invented a stocking-frame. This too was in Elizabeth's time. In those golden days, William Lee of Woodborough, in Norfolk, was a student at Cambridge; Somewhat given to maidens as well as to mathematics, but not so utterly wasting his time with the former pleasant trifles but that he found both learning and leisure to achieve an M. A. degree, and obtain a Fellowship.

Master Lee was especially addicted to talk agreeable nonsense to an honest lass in the town, who gained her living, and increased the smiles of her pretty face, by knitting stockings, to her very great profit. Now this Cambridge damsel did not care the value of a dropped stitch for such love as rich William Lee brought her at sundown every coming eve; and she told him as much. “Ay, marry!" said the vindictive lover, "then thou shalt rue thy words and thy contempt."-" Marry scenteth of Rome," said the orthodox knitter; "and thou art as false in love as in faith."

Master Lee however was a "fellow" who was true to his word. He was piqued at being rejected,―he, a gentleman, by a pert knitter of stockings; and he took but a base way of revenging his pique. He had sat knitting his brow in vain, when all at once the thought struck him that he would knit stockings too, and that by a process which should ruin the poor damsel, who, poor as she was, despised an unworthy gentleman and scholar. Thereupon he actually invented and set up the stocking-frame. He first worked at it himself, and then taught his squire-brothers, and his gentle relations; and finally he opened a manufactory at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, and made stockings for the Maiden Queen.

All the hand-kitters were in despair, and they left no means untried to bring the new invention into disrepute. Nor did they try in vain, for Will Lee was driven out of England by the force of the coalition against him. He set up his frames at Rouen, and

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