and Lord le Despenser gave Paul the post of Deputy-Treasurer of the Chamber, with £800 a year to reconcile the patriot to becoming a placeman. He now took his annual tours like a nobleman, and in the course of one of them he found himself at Deal. There, in a little literary circle, Mrs. Carter met him, to that pious and learned lady's profound horror. She had scarcely patience to hear him read one of his productions; and she who had translated 'Epictetus,' in order to gain consolation from his philosophy for being the native of a place so dull, dreary, dirty, dear, and dismal as Deal, could hardly recall a maxim or two to her mind to fortify her against the annoyance of playing second fiddle to the atheistical son of an old London tailor!

Yet Paul was one of the finest of gentlemen in his way, and associated with the very finest of the same class. He not only had his country-house at Twickenham, but a coruscant circle about him of wits whose brilliancy was not considered as tarnished by the most mouldy blasphemy. He was, as I have said, the choice spirit of that club which met at Medenham Abbey. We are struck with a species of horror when we contemplate Augustus and his friends reclining at a banquet dressed out as, and named after, the gods whom they professed to adore. It was a thousand times worse with the atheistical wits who met at Medenham to drown themselves in drink, to wallow in every inconceivable extravagance of vice, and amid it all to laugh at Heaven's lightning. To crown the horror, these exemplary individuals took the guise and names of the Apostles; and nude Marthas and Marys held the bowl to the lips of Simon Peter and of Jude. But enough of this awful habit of the day. Suffice it to say, that Paul Whitehead and Wilkes, the immaculate patriot, were the most licentious of these pseudo-apostles, and gloried in their shame.

The hour in which the former was called to answer for the crime, struck in 1774. Paul was then residing

in Henrietta-street, Covent-garden; and, when he felt the hand of the Inevitable upon him, he burned all his erotic and infidel poetry, as if that could hide his sins from the eye of his Judge. He added to this the heathenish folly of bequeathing his heart to Lord le Despenser. That exemplary nobleman accepted the legacy; and the precious bequest, solemnly inurned, was pompously borne to West Wycombe Church, attended by a procession of minstrels, singers, and admiring friends. As to the quality of the clergy present, it may be judged of by the fact that they stood unprotestingly by while the vocalists, engaged by the Medenham apostles, sang, with rapt expression, the following strophe:

"From earth to heaven Whitehead's soul is fled ;
Refulgent glories beam about his head;

His Muse, concording with resounding strings,
Gives angels words to praise the King of Kings."

When such things were sung of a Medenham apostle, in presence of an unprotesting clergy, we need not wonder that there were a few serious men, with a certain John Wesley at the head of them, anxiously seeking for a "method" to remedy the enormous evils of the times.

We perhaps have deferred too long to notice the establishment of which such men as Stow and Speed were members, and which has furnished many a scholar or gallant gentleman to illustrate arts or arms. Let us then say a word of honoured "Merchant Tailors'."

66

MEMS. OF

MERCHANT TAILORS."

"My heart is yours,

And you shall see it spring, and shoot forth leaves
Worthy your eye; and the oppressed sap

Ascend to ev'ry part, to make it green

And pay your love with fruit, when harvest comes."
LOVE TRICKS, by Shirley, a pupil of M. T.

I REGRET to say it, but the Rev. H. B. Wilson, the reverend author of that half-hundredweight quarto which gives the history of the Merchant Tailors, and which the author hoped would find its way into our villages, is ashamed of the origin of his heroes. He has even enough of false pride to beg that writers will spell Merchant Taylors with a y, and not with an i! Tailors with an i, he says, may be mistaken for a trade; while Taylors with a y may be taken for a name! So was Sir Piercie Shafton ever blushing at the idea of his father's calling; and so do the Smiths with an i, fancy that they glide into gentility and euphony by becoming Smyths with a y.

How long the City guild of tailors has sustained a corporate dignity it would be hard to say; we know however that Edward I. confirmed the guild under their old name of "Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers." Their symbolic shield bore a tent between two mantles, denoting that the honest men of the guild made cloaks for all customers, and tents for the royal army. Many a marquis has not half so delicate a device; and the Mercatores Scissores have been worthily translated by those far less useful gentlemen, -the members of the College of Arms. The oath of the

livery bound the new brother to the utmost possible respectability of life; but the oath was not broken when the taker of it, in a fit of enthusiastic pride, broke the head of a "Merchant Skinner" who dared claim precedency over the "Tailor." A "bloody coxcomb" was too often the crest of the valiant Mercatores Scissores.

Of the members of the company, in the olden time, the most illustrious was Hawkwood, to whom I have assigned a chapter, as becoming his super-sartorial dignity. Here I will only briefly speak of the school, and the more illustrious men whom it has furnished to the public service. The latter are bound to drink the immortal memory of the royal founder of the "Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers."

The school was established by the company in 1560-1, "for children of all nations and countries indifferently;" a liberal provision, which was contracted in 1731 by an order of court, whereby express exclusion was made of the children of Jews. Among the statutes, there is especial injunction that, "in the schoole, at noe time of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles only;" an injunction which shows less regard for grammar than gentility. The school rather tripped at the beginning; for though Mulcaster, the head master, was an accomplished scholar, the ushers brought with them from the north such a Boeotian accent, that the boys went home talking "broad Yorkshire!"

Mulcaster, the master, too could occasionally indulge in very harsh English of the vulgar tongue, abusing the "visitors" roundly, a rudeness that ought not to have been seen at a school lit only with wax candles, and having six or seven and thirty scholarships at St. John's. Mulcaster was a choleric man; but in his mastership of a quarter of a century he "turned out" four bishops. These, when boys, had been the widest awake, while the master slept; for, as Fuller tells us, "he slept his hour (custom made him critical

to proportion it) in his desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity, as soon as he to pardon. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children." In our days, Dr. Hessey can make good scholars by a more merciful and dignified process.

Wilkinson, the successor of Mulcaster, had the famous Whitelock for a pupil; and under the third master, Smith, we find at the school a boy named Juxon, who afterwards stood on the scaffold with Charles I., and smoothed the sovereign's path from time into eternity. Boyle and Dee were also at this time young "Merchant Tailors," whose subsequent manly merits reflected lustre on the old foundation. Smith's successor, Haynes, was, like Mulcaster, rather ready with his tongue and heavy with his hand. He chastised unmercifully; and, on being menaced with complaint to the wardens, he was so audacious as to declare that he did not care a "phillip" for them. His ushers, too, appear to have been rough of speech; and "Bridewell rogue" was the tutorial epithet for a rebellious pupil. Haynes too was accused of encouraging little lotteries for his own profit, and not for the recreation of the pupils. "For," says the complaint, "you suffer none to drawe any one lott, but those that bring xiid. or above. Your biggest lot is one grammer of xd. which is the greate lott; the rest are inkhornes, hobby-horses, gingerbread, paints, and puddings of very small value." The master of Merchant Tailors' is indignant thereat, and protests that not only is the matter one of pure entertainment, but that he makes nothing by it, and that he finds the drawers in "dyett bread, comfitts of all sorts, ffiggs, raysonnes, allmonds, stewed prunes, wiggs, beare, and some wine, and all kinds of ffrute, which the season of the yeare affordes."