of paternal love.  The tailor, with fresh-ground shears, and perfect faith in the gentility and solvency of his “client,” snips, and snips, and snips, until the “superfine” grows, with each abscission, into the first style of elegance and fashion, and the excited schneider feels himself “every inch a king,” his shop a herald’s college, and every brown paper pattern garnishing its walls, an escutcheon of gentility.

But to dismount from our Pegasus, or, in other words, to cut the poetry, and come to the practice of our subject, it is necessary that a perfect gentleman should be cut up very high, or cut down very low—­i.e., up to the marquis or down to the jarvey.  Any intermediate style is perfectly inadmissible; for who above the grade of an attorney would wear a coat with pockets inserted in the tails, like salt-boxes; or any but an incipient Esculapius indulge in trousers that evinced a morbid ambition to become knee-breeches, and were only restrained in their aspirations by a pair of most strenuous straps.  We will now proceed to details.

The dressing-gown should be cut only—­for the arm holes; but be careful that the quantity of material be very ample—­say four times as much as is positively necessary, for nothing is so characteristic of a perfect gentleman as his improvidence.  This garment must be constructed without buttons or button-holes, and confined at the waist with cable-like bell-ropes and tassels.  This elegant deshabille had its origin (like the Corinthian capital from the Acanthus) in accident.  A set of massive window-curtains having been carelessly thrown over a lay figure, or tailor’s torso, in Nugee’s studio, in St. James’s-street, suggested to the luxuriant mind of the Adonisian D’Orsay, this beautiful combination of costume and upholstery.  The eighteen-shilling chintz great-coats, so ostentatiously put forward by nefarious tradesmen as dressing-gowns, and which resemble pattern-cards of the vegetable kingdom, are unworthy the notice of all gentlemen—­of course excepting those who are so by act of Parliament.  Although it is generally imagined that the coat is the principal article of dress, we attach far greater importance to the trousers, the cut of which should, in the first place, be regulated by nature’s cut of the leg.  A gentleman who labours under either a convex or a concave leg, cannot be too particular in the arrangement of the strap-draught.  By this we mean that a concave leg must have the pull on the convex side, and vice versa, the garment being made full, the effects of bad nursing are, by these means, effectually “repealed."[2] This will be better understood if the reader will describe a parallelogram, and draw therein the arc of a circle equal to that described by his leg, whether knock-kneed or bandy.

    [2] Baylis.

If the leg be perfectly straight, then the principal peculiarity of cut to be attended to, is the external assurance that the trousers cannot be removed from the body without the assistance of a valet.