The tailor is the victim of misconstruction. Remember George Eliot’s story of a man so snuffy that the cat happening to pass near him was seized with such a violent sternutation as to be cruelly misunderstood! Let Baboo Ishuree Dass say, “Tailors, they are very dishonest”; he is speaking of natives. Let Burton say, “The tailor is a thief”; he was fanciful. And let Urquiza of Paita be detested; he was only a half-bred Peruvian. Remember the regiment of London tailors; De Quincy’s brave journeyman tailor; M. Achille Jules Cesar Le Grand, who was so courteous to Marguerite in the “Morals of May Fair”; the tailor of Yarrow who beat Mr. Tickler at backgammon; the famous tailor who killed seven at one blow and lived to divide a kingdom, and to call a queen his stepmother. Read “Mouat’s Quinquennial Report of the Lower Provinces,” and learn that the number of tailors in prison was less by one half than that of the priests. They were, moreover, the only class that had the decency to be incarcerated in round numbers, thereby notably facilitating the taking of averages and the deduction of most valuable observations.
Tailors, the ninth part of a man! Then are all Æthiops harmless? Can no Cretan speak a true word, or a Bœotian a wise one? Are all Italians blaspheming, and is Egypt merry Egypt? Nature, and she is no fool, has thought good to reproduce the tailor type in bird and insect: then why does man contemn the tailor? Because he sits cross-legged? Then is there not a whole man in Persia. Why should our children be taught in the nursery rhyme, how “nine-and-twenty tailors went out to kill a snail, but not a single one of them dared to touch his tail”? Or why should the
