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better than they do on common days. It is pure nonsense to say that
beauty when unadorned is adorned the most. For that is as much as to say
that a pretty young woman, in the matter of physical appearance, is a
person of whom no more can be made. Now taste and skill can make more of
almost anything. And you will set down Thomson's lines as flatly opposed
to fact, when your lively young cousin walks into your room to let you
see her before she goes out to an evening party, and when you compare
that radiant vision, in her robes of misty texture, and with hair
arranged in folds the most complicated, wreathed, and satin-shoed,
with the homely figure that took a walk with you that afternoon,
russet-gowned, tartan-plaided, and shod with serviceable boots for
tramping through country mud. One does not think of loveliness in the
case of men, because they have not got any; but their aspect, such as it
is, is mainly made by their tailors. And it is a lamentable thought,
how very ill the clothes of most men are made. I think that the art of
draping the male human body has been brought to much less excellence
by the mass of those who practise it than any other of the useful and
ornamental arts. Tailors, even in great cities, are generally extremely
bad. Or it may be that the providing the human frame with decent and
well-fitting garments is so very difficult a thing that (save by a great
genius here and there) it can be no more than approximated to. As for
tailors in little country villages, their power of distorting and
disfiguring is wonderful. When I used to be a country clergyman, I
remember how, when I went to the funeral of some simple rustic, I was
filled with surprise to see the tall, strapping, fine young country
lads, arrayed in their black suits. What awkward figures they looked
in those unwonted garments! How different from their easy, natural
appearance in their every-day fustian! Here you would see a young fellow
with a coat whose huge collar covered half his head when you looked at
him from behind; a very common thing was to have sleeves which entirely
concealed the hands; and the wrinkled and baggy aspect of the whole
suits could be imagined only by such as have seen them. It may be
remarked here, that those strong country lads were in another respect
people of whom more might have been physically made. Oh for a
drill-sergeant to teach them to stand upright, and to turn out their
toes, and to get rid of that slouc