st the
existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavor to
ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant
in people of this profession above all others.

And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being
derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products
of that unhappy event, a certain _seriousness_ (to say no more of it)
may in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon
the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of
contriving the human apparel has been intrusted, to keep up the
memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing
remonstrance against those vanities which the absurd conversion of a
memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to
produce? Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that
the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the caballistic
language of his order is said to have _certain melancholy_ regions
always open under his feet.--But waiving further inquiry into final
causes, where the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try
to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy.

I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some
subordinate ones, viz.:

The sedentary habits of the tailor.--
Something peculiar in his diet.--

First, his _sedentary habits_.--In Dr. Norris's famous narrative of
the frenzy of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to
the occasion of the swelling in his legs, replies that it came "by
criticism;" to which the learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a
distemper which he had never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have
been mad upon all subjects) rejoins, with some warmth, that it was no
distemper, but a noble art; that he had sat fourteen hours a day at
it; and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that there was
a communication between the brain and the legs.

When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously,
which the critic probably practised only while he was writing his
"remarks," is no more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance
of his art, submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year,
shall we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner
overclouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between the noble and
less noble parts of the body which Dennis hints at? The unnatural and
painful manner of his sitting