tend, if properly
applied, to the inappreciable beautification of your own valuable
person. Descend we therefore from the head and trunk of man--a curious
bathos--to his understandings and unmentionables; you know what we mean.
And herein, as in duty bound, draw we a distinction. "We know how to
call all the drawers by name," (if we may so take a liberty with friend
William's prose;) and let us therefore premise that we shall notice the
unmentionable trews, _femoralia_, or _periscelemata_--as the Greeks
would probably have called them, only they wore them not, but like
Highland laddies preferred their own hides--of the virile portion of the
community only. As for those tantalizing appendages of the better
portion of her Majesty's subjects, we leave them in their proper
concealment. We could easily write a volume or two to show that the
custom came on Ormus, or Ind, or Araby the Blest; but criticism would
not be tolerated, and besides--

----"Levius fit patientia
Quidquid corrigere est nefas."
"On s accoutume a tout!"

Go, therefore, aesthetic reader, to Trajan's column at Rome, and amid the
barbaric costumes which adorn it, you will find the prototype of the
modern trouser. Or you need not travel so much out of your way. In the
Townley Gallery there is the figure of Mithras with a fashionable
pantaloon on his legs; and in the Louvre there are two or three
disconsolate-looking barbaric captives, with their trousers flapping
about their shins, and tied round their ankles: these are the originals
of our modern what-d'ye-call'ems. As for the good old buckskins of our
venerated grandsires and governors, they arose in Roman times.
Field-marshal Julius Caesar wore something very near of kin to them under
his military kilt, in that pretty little skirmish wherein he first had
the honour of exchanging stones and darts with our British ancestors;
and from those days down to the present time has this garment maintained
its ground, and proved its utility, with undying pertinacity. Now, we do
not approve of the barbaric trews: that tying of them round the ankles,
though it kept out the cold, was decidedly a Sawney practice: it
militated against the curves of the leg, and destroyed all firmness and
dignity of gait. Far better was the fashion of the middle ages, when the
trouser became a real pantaloon--_a pantalon_ collant, as modern artists
call it, and when the full symmetry of the limb was displayed to the
ut