riety in the coat of a man of fashion, an
unstudied ease, a graceful symmetry, a delicacy of expression, that has
always filled us with the profoundest admiration of the genius of the
artist; indeed, no ready money could purchase coats that we have
seen--coats that a real love of the subject, and working upon long
credit, for a high connexion, could alone have given to the
world--coats, not the dull conceptions of a geometric cutter,
spiritlessly outlined upon the shop-board by the crayon of a mercenary
foreman, but the fortunate creation of superior intelligence, boldly
executed in the happy moments of a generous enthusiasm!

Vain, very vain is it for the pretender to fashion to go swelling into
the _atelier_ of a first-rate coat architect, with his ready money in
his hand, to order such a coat! _Order_ such a coat, forsooth! order a
Raphael, a Michael Angelo, an epic poem. Such a coat--we say it with the
generous indignation of a free Briton--is one of the exclusive
privileges reserved, by unjust laws, to a selfish aristocracy!

The aristocratic trouser-cutter, too, deserves our unlimited
approbation. Nothing more distinguishes the nineteenth century, in which
those who can manage it have the happiness to live, than the precision
we have attained in trouser-cutting. While yet the barbarism of the age,
or poverty of customers, _vested_ the office of trouser-cutter and coat
architect in the same functionary, coats were without _soul_, and
"inexpressibles" inexpressibly bad, or, as Coleridge would have said,
"ridiculous exceedingly." In our day, on the contrary, we have attained
to such a pitch of excellence, that the trouser-cutter who fails to give
expression to his works, is hunted into the provinces, and condemned for
life to manufacture nether garments for clergymen and country gentlemen.

The results of the minute division of labour, to which so much of the
excellence of all that is excellent in London is mainly owing, is in
nothing more apparent than in that department of the fine arts which
people devoid of taste call fashionable tailoring. We have at the West
End fashionable _artistes_ in riding coats, in dress coats, in
cut-aways; one is superlative in a Taglioni, another devotes the powers
of his mind exclusively to the construction of a Chesterfield, a third
gives the best years of his life to the symmetrical beauty of a
barrel-trouser; from the united exertions of these, and a thousand other
men of taste a