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He has no consolation for the afflicted, for care. produceth wrinkles; he shuns laughter, lest he should shake the powder from his curls; he cannot smoke lest his coat should smell of tobacco; and he is prevented from the moderate use of wine, for it would endanger, if not ruin, his complexion. These well-dressed advocates for virtue avoid gluttony, not that they may practise abstinence, but lest they should injure their shapes; they fly from drunkenness, not because it is a vice, dangerous in itself and destructive in its consequences, but that they may preserve their faces from pimples. Reasons of equal moment regulate all their actions, concerns, and opinions. The man of dress is, perchance, a dissenter, because the path-way which leads to the meeting-house is cleaner than that to the church; or he is a churchman, because his pew is lined with green baize.

There is an equivocal species of beings, called petites maitres, who are owned by neither sex, and shunned by both. They are a race not peculiar to any nation, or clime, or country. Ancient Rome

• He is one of that uncomfortable species so happily delineated in the learned preface to Bellendenus:

Ψυχραν έχει παις καρδιαν θερμοις επι

Υδαρες τε πως, και λεπτον αιμ' αει τρέφων
Νήφειν τ' απιστειν τ' αρθρα του βίου λεγει,
Αοίνον, αγελαστον, απροσηγορον τέρας.

They are evidently alluded to in the following epigram of Ausonius:

Dum dubitat natura marem faceretne puellam,
Factus es, O pulcher, pæne puella, puer !

had many of them; Modern Rome, has, I suspect, more. They flourish among our pacified friends in France; nor are we in England entirely without them. We may soon, perhaps, hear of their existence among our colonists at Botany-bay; that they have sprung up in the fashionable part of Lapland, or are gaining ground with the paper money in North America.

To this part of the creation is almost entirely confined that violent extravagance of dress which fixes a man's head between two capes or promonto ries, like an attorney in the pillory, and cuts away the skirts of his coat, as if he had narrowly escaped from a fire. Among these whimsical innovators in dress, I have found all my conclusions respecting the state of their minds built upon unsound foundations. The same spirit of innovation, which was continually varying the position of the sleeve-button, or the pattern of the stocking, might, I thought, render them unquiet members of the community, and dangerous to the state. But I am happily mistaken. They are harmless citizens; and those minds which, in my patriotic zeal, I was too fearful might be plotting against my country, I have, upon a closer examination, discovered to be a perfect blank.

Somewhat of a man's mind may, perhaps, be discovered by his promptitude or backwardness to comply with what is termed the fashion of dress.

誓 Give me, ye gods, the husband cries, an heir; The teeming wife demands a daughter fair: The gods, too kind, nor that deny, nor this;

Forth comes an heir, half master and half miss.

He who can be content to follow fashion, with all her mutability, through all her revolutions, must have imbibed some of that fickleness which such a pursuit inspires. The same uncertainty which makes him fluctuate between Mr. Rag the tailor, and Mr. Blossom the habit-maker, will mark his conduct in the more serious concerns of life.

He, on the contrary, who is ridiculously precise in dress, nothing varying according to the fashion of the times, will be generally found overbearingly dogmatical in opinion. The same bigotry which condemns him to one pair of buckles, will chain him down likewise to one set of opinions. He would contend for the propriety of his dialect, though he were educated within a mile of the lake of Windermere; he would defend his taste, though he brought it from the isle of Sky; and he would dogmatize in religion, though he had his unstable principles from Birmingham.

It is a common custom from the dress and appearance of a man to guess at his trade or profession. The decency of the round curl, the gravity of the black coat, and the emblematic orthodoxy of everlasting waistcoat and breeches, are sufficient to mark a man for a defender of the faith. The laying out of the "gravel-walk and grass-plat" in a citizen's green and gold waistcoat, will evince to an accurate observer the street in which he lives, and whether his warehouse contains the goods of an eminent shoemaker, the right pigtail of a tobacconist, or the ventures of a Turkey merchant. When we see those unaccountable combinations of ill mixing colours, which are sometimes displayed in the coat, waistcoat, and breeches, we cannot

help suspecting, that the wearer of them is by profession a fiddler not much in repute, or by trade a tailor, with no other use for his patterns than to make "a motley suit" for himself.

It requires no great penetration to discover, that the short man with the anchor on his button, who contends for the liberty of the press, is the midshipman of a man of war; or that the fat laughterloving dame, all pink ribbons and smiles, makes sausages in Fetter-lane, or dispenses cakes and ale at the bar of the Cross Marrow-bones, near Mileend turnpike.

What, after all, it may be asked, is the standard of propriety in dress?—There is, perhaps, none. His own judgment and understanding must be the guide of every one. And it may not be useless to remember, that from the outward appearance people form opinions of the inward man; that he will 'excite indignation, whose whole mind is visibly laid out upon his dress, as certainly as the professed drunkard will disgust, whose face is like the south aspect of a garden-wall, hung with ripe fruit. He who, perhaps, owes the poverty of his understanding to his own neglect, will in vain endeavour to repair his consequence and dignity by the assistance of the graces and the tailors; all they can do for him is, to render his folly more apparent, and himself more ridiculous.

Moderation is, perhaps, no where a more positive virtue than in dress, to which no man of sense will devote the whole of his time, and no reasonable man will refuse some portion of it.

MONRO.

No. XV.

SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 1787.

-Nimis alta sapit,

Bellua multorum capitum.

In a society, instituted for the purpose of amicable disputation, to which I once found means to obtain admittance, the following question was proposed for discussion :-" Which circumstance would be more irksome to a gentleman of delicate feelings; the reflection that he had killed another in a duel, or had been himself pulled by the nose from Penzance in Cornwall, to our town of Berwickupon-Tweed, by way of London." That his audience might have as clear a comprehension as possible of the subject to be discussed, the leader of the debate thought it necessary to specify to them the distance between the two places mentioned, in which his accuracy was questioned by a gentleman with his handkerchief under his wig. The contest was carried on with violence and acrimony, but was at length somewhat appeased by means of a third person, who, upon bringing the parties to explain, discovered that they had made their calculations upon different principles, the one having consulted Paterson's book of roads, the other, Ogilby's.

It was on all sides sagaciously concluded upon that one must be wrong: but it was impossible to ascertain which, without examining the compara

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