ruelty of the human animal is gratified, and the idea of a
tailor's suffering is never conceived by a customer without involuntary
cachinnation. Not only is he denied the attribute of integral
manhood--which even a man-milliner by courtesy enjoys--but that
principle which induces a few men of enthusiastic temperament to pay
debts, is always held a fault when applied to the bills of tailors. And,
what is a curious and instructive fact in the natural history of London
fashionable tailors, and altogether unnoticed by the Rev. Leonard
Jenyns, in his _Manual of British Vertebrate Animals_, if you go to one
of these gentlemen, requesting him to "execute," and professing your
readiness to pay his bill on demand or delivery, he will be sure to give
your order to the most scurvy botch in his establishment, put in the
worst materials, and treat you altogether as a person utterly
unacquainted with the usages of polite society. But if, on the contrary,
you are recommended to him by Lord Fly-by-night, of Denman Priory--if
you give a thundering order, and, instead of offering to pay for it,
pull out a parcel of bill-stamps, and _promise_ fifty per cent for a few
hundreds down, you will be surprised to observe what delight will
express itself in the radiant countenance of your victim: visions of
cent per cent, ghosts of post-obits, dreams of bonds with penalties, and
all those various shapes in which security delights to involve the
extravagant, rise flatteringly before the inward eye of the man of
shreds and patches. By these transactions with the great, he becomes
more and more a man, less and less a tailor; instead of cutting patterns
and taking measures, he flings the tailoring to his foreman, becoming
first Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer to peers of
the realm.

With a few more of the less important distinctive peculiarities of the
gentleman of fashion, we may dismiss this portion of our subject. A
gentleman never affects military air or costume if he is not a military
man, and even then avoids professional rigidity and swagger as much as
possible; he never sports spurs or a riding-whip, except when he is upon
horseback, contrary to the rule observed by his antagonist the snob, who
always sports spurs and riding-whip, but who never mounts higher than a
threepenny stride on a Hampstead donkey. Nor does a gentleman ever wear
a _moustache_, unless he belongs to one of the regiments of hussars, or
the household c