Saloons, they “most do congregate.”  Once set your eyes upon them, once become acquainted with their habits and manners, and then mistake them if you can.  They are themselves, alone:  like the London dustmen, the Nemarket jockeys, the peripatetic venders, or buyers of “old clo’,” or the Albert continuations at one pound one, they appear to be made to measure for the same.  We must now describe them (to speak theatrically) with decorations, scenes, and properties!  The entirely new dresses of a theatre are like the habiliments of the professional singer, i.e. neither one nor the other ever were entirely new, and never will be allowed to grow entirely old.  The double-milled Saxony of these worthies is generally very blue or very brown; the cut whereof sets a man of a contemplative turn of mind wondering at what precise date those tails were worn, and vainly speculating on the probabilities of their being fearfully indigestible, as that alone could to long have kept them from Time’s remorseless maw.  The collars are always velvet, and always greasy.  There is a slight ostentation manifested in the seams, the stitches whereof are so apparent as to induce the beholders to believe they must have been the handiwork of some cherished friend, whose labours ought not to be entombed beneath the superstructure.  The buttons!—­oh, for a pen of steam to write upon those buttons!  They, indeed, are the aristocracy—­the yellow turbans, the sun, moon, and stars of the woollen system!  They have nothing in common with the coat—­they are on it, and that’s all—­they have no further communion—­they decline the button-holes, and eschew all right to labour for their living—­they announce themselves as “the last new fashion”—­they sparkle for a week, retire to their silver paper, make way for the new comers, and, years after, like the Sleeping Beauty, rush to life in all their pristine splendour, and find (save in the treble-gilt aodication and their own accession) the coat, the immortal coat, unchanged!  The waistcoat is of a material known only to themselves—­a sort of nightmare illusion of velvet, covered with a slight tracery of refined mortar, curiously picked out and guarded with a nondescript collection of the very greenest green pellets of hyson-bloom gunpowder tea.  The buttons (things of use in this garment) describe the figure and proportions of a large turbot.  They consist of two rows (leaving imagination to fill up a lapse of the absent), commencing, to all appearance, at the small of the back, and reaching down even to the hem of the garment, which is invariably a double-breasted one, made upon the good old dining-out principle of leaving plenty of room in the victualling department.  To complete the catalogue of raiment, the untalkaboutables have so little right to the name of drab, that it would cause a controversy on the point.  Perhaps nothing in life can more exquisitely illustrate the Desdemona