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.

Secondly, there was William of Champeaux, who founded the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris. This William was a man of large learning and small means; and he was well content to dine daily on a lettuce, a pinch of salt, and a mouthful of bread. The shadows of dinners which form the substance of tailors' repasts, are reflections from the board of William of Champeaux.

Thirdly, there was William of Paris, the familiar friend of St. Louis, King of France. This bishop, next to piety, was famed for his knowledge of politics; and as tailors have ever been renowned for knowing what is going on "i' the capitol," and for discussing such goings on with uncommon freedom, I think we may trace this characteristic of the race to the news-loving and loquacious prelate of eight centuries ago.

Fourthly, there was St. William of Maleval, of sufficiently ignoble birth to have been a tailor; and who did, in his youth and his cups, what modern young tailors frequently offer to do under similar circumstances, namely, enlist. If our useful friends have not imitated the later example set them by the Saint, we may trace their love of the pot, at least, to the early model they found in their patron of Maleval; and if often they find themselves in the station-house, lying upon no softer bed than the bare ground, they doubtless find the reflection as feathers to their bruised sides, that it was even thus that the founder of the Gulielmites lay in a cave of the Evil Valley to which he gave a name (Male Val), and which before was known by no better than the Stable of Rhodes.

Fifthly, there was William of Gelone, Duke of Aquitaine, whom it took St. Bernard twice to convert before he made a Christian of him; and who had such gallant propensities that he might have been one of the couple sung of in the 'Bridal of Triermain,' where of three personages it is said that—

"There were two who loved their neighbours' wive,

And one who loved his own."

The well-known gallantry of the tailors therefore is an heirloom from William of Aquitaine.

Sixthly, there was William, sometime Archbishop of Bourges, who left to the guild of whom we are treating the example which is followed by so many of its members, and which consisted in utterly dispensing with a shirt. He further never added to his costume in winter, nor diminished anything in it in summer; and

they who have taken St. William for a patron are known, though not for the same reasons, to be followers of the same fashion.

Then there was, seventhly, St. William of Norwich, whose father, after hesitating whether to bind him apprentice to a tailor or a tanner, had just placed him with the latter when the lad was seized upon by the Jews, and by them tortured and crucified, in derision of Christ. On Easter Day they put the body into a sack, and carried it into Thorpe Wood, where it was afterwards discovered, and buried, with many miraculous incidents to illustrate the funeral; and where was afterwards erected the chapel of St. William in the Wood. Now, at first sight, it would appear difficult to decide as to what the tailors' guild derived from William of Norwich. But it is only at first sight, and to those unaccustomed to follow a trail, and not determined to find what they are looking for. In allusion to what had befallen the body of St. William, or rather in memory of how that body was conveyed away, after life had been expelled from it, the Norwich tailors first adopted that now consecrated phrase of "getting the sack," and which phrase implies a loss of position, to the detriment of the loser.

But I have not done; Williams are as plentiful as blackberries. There is an eighth, the Abbot of Eskille, who no more liked to play sub-prior to a superior than Garrick liked to play an unapplauded Falconbridge to Sheridan's King John. William of Eskille was a great reformer of slothful convents, by whose inmates he was as much detested as an honest and vigilant foreman is by operatives who work by the day. One thing deemed worthy of mention by his biographers consists in the dreary fact that he wore the same shirt for thirty years. At the end of that time he turned it, and then piously blessed the saints for "the comfort of clean linen." I question if even modern tailors have succeeded in attaining to this extent of saintly uncleanliness, but I would not be too certain of that fact. As for what they may further have derived from this excellent person, it is well known that for an abbot to be called an Abbot d'Eskille was the highest possible compliment that could