se favour? The English cut is base and gentlemen
scorne it, novelty is daintye; speake the woord sir, and my sissars are
ready to execute your worships wil.

"His head being once drest, which requires in combing and rubbing some
two howers, hee comes to the bason: then being curiously washt with no
woorse then a camphire bal, he descends as low as his berd, and asketh
whether he please to be shaven or no, whether he will have his peak cut
short and sharpe, amiable like an _inamorato_, or broad pendant like a
spade, to be terrible like a warrior and a Soldado ... if it be his
pleasure to have his appendices primed or his mustachios fostered to
turn about his eares like ye branches of a vine...."

The question pending between cloth and velvet is submitted to a jury;
men of the various professions are called and accepted, or rejected,
according to their merit; each is described, often in a very lively
manner. Here is, for example, the portrait of a poet or rather of _the_
poet of the Elizabethan period; for the specimen here represented stands
as a type for all his class; and it is worth notice, for if Shakespeare
himself was different, many of his associates at the "Mermaid," we may
be sure, well answered the description. "I espied far off a certain kind
of an overworne gentleman, attired in velvet and satin; but it was
somewhat dropped and greasie, and bootes on his legges, whose soles
wexed thin and seemed to complaine of their maister, which treading
thrift under his feet, had brought them unto that consumption. He walked
not as other men in the common beaten way, but came compassing
_circumcirca_, as if we had beene divells and he would draw a circle
about us, and at every third step he looked back as if he were afraid of
a baily or a sarjant." Cloth Breeches, who seems to be describing here
Greene himself, is not too severe in his appreciation of the character
of the poor troubled fellow: "If he have forty pound in his purse
together, he puts it not to usury, neither buies land nor merchandise
with it, but a moneths commodity of wenches and capons. Ten pound a
supper, why tis nothing if his plough goes and his ink horne be cleere
... But to speak plainely I think him an honest man if he would but live
within his compasse, and generally no mans foe but his own. Therefore I
hold him a man fit to be of my jury."

Judgment is passed in favour of cloth England against velvet England;
and in this ultra-conservative sente