x
inches long, cut into the rich velvets and silks of their garments. They
were grand, solemn times those! There was no such thing as a man taking
liberties with his toilet; it was a serious piece of business to dress
properly; and it must have been a matter of no small difficulty to keep a
coat clean and decent. We strongly suspect, notwithstanding those
flattering rogues the limners, that our great-great-grandfathers had to
put up with a vast lot of dirt and discomfort; and that their coats, so
expensive to purchase, must have been in no very enviable condition by the
time they were left off. Fine days those for a valet-de-chambre! An honest
fellow had then some chance of getting a penny out of the Israelitish
dealers; and my lord's gentleman might entertain a reasonable prospect of
retiring upon his means, long before reaching his grand climacteric. But
events marched onwards. The coat, originally intended to be buttoned all
the way down--and Louis XIV. actually did wear it buttoned below the
ventricular curve--was gradually allowed to flaunt away in an open,
dissolute manner, and to display the radiant glories of the vest. Men then
came to ask themselves that momentous question, What is the use of such
large skirts to our coats, if we do not employ them? And so they took the
liberty, some of buttoning them back, others of cutting off a good large
corner. The tailors found their account in this. Coats kept up at a
proportionally equivalent price; but the profits of the drapers were much
diminished, and by and by dwindled to a mere nothing. It was from that
fatal period when the waistcoat wheedled itself into fashion, that the
glory of the coat began to set; and, when once the skirt came to be
retrenched, the majesty of the coat was gone for ever. Dear old Sir Roger
de Coverley! gentle Will Honeycombe! ye were the last that knew how to
unite the graces and the dignity of these two discordant garments: from
your times, down to those of poor Beau Brummell, coats and waistcoats have
degenerated through all degrees of folly, even to the verge of stark
staring madness!

The noble mantle, and the solemn cloak, its successor, and the comfortable
roquelaire, its grandson, and the old, farmer-like great-coat, its
_arriere-petit-fils_, and the pilot-coat, the great-coat's brother that
ran away from home and went to sea, and the paletot, a foreign bastard
that could not prove who its father was, nor even tell how it came by its