most advantage. This was, no doubt, the acme of perfection that the
garment in question was capable of; and it is to be lamented that the
mode has not kept its position in society more universally. For all
purposes of ceremonial or ornamental dress, this form should still be
rigidly adhered to. Utility and ornament here go hand in hand, or rather
inside each other. No disguisement of natural form is attempted; and a
man's appearance is judged of at its true value. The tight pantaloon is
at once simple, useful, and beautiful. So far for its form. But there is
an immense difficulty in the choice of its substance. If too elastic,
the knee will soon make for itself one of those provoking pudding-bags
that have tended, more than any thing else, to bring the fashion into
disfavour. If too rigid and too frail, you know the catastrophe! We
still remember the case of a fat friend of ours at a fancy-ball! British
manufacturing ingenuity should bestir itself to invent a stuff fit for
satisfactorily solving this vestimental problem of the greatest strain;
and the pantaloon might then once more resume its paramount sway. To
revert to the old buckskin: it is a perfectly respectable, useful, and
satisfactory affair for the purposes to which it is now applied, and
worn with a stout top-boot, and thrown over the side of a gallant horse,
has no superior in the world. It is also a very good thing to put on if
you are going to a new tailor's in town, especially if you can write
Harkaway Hall as your address. The man will set you down for a real
country-squire, and will give you tick for the next twenty years. But if
you want to avoid having your pocket picked, don't wear buckskins as you
go along Piccadilly; buckskins and tops, on foot, are so truly Arcadian
in their appearance, that the swell mob cannot resist the temptation,
and you are pretty sure to be victimized. As for the unmeaning black
things worn with white silk stockings on court-days, and gloried in by
all the beaux of the eighteenth century, they ought to be sent to the
right-about as neither useful nor becoming. It may be all very well for
Spanish matadors and Castilian dancers to wear them; but they were
originally intended to have boots beneath them--so Charles I. wore them
until he borrowed a foolish fashion from France--and from the very cut
and nature of them, they should be worn so still, or abandoned
altogether. We quarrel with them, not on the score of form so much as on