cabbage" occurs but once, and then with
the deliberate explanation that it means "worts" and is "good cabbage,"
may we not regard such reticence upon this tender point as a touching
confirmation of the truth of our theory? See, too, the comparison which
Shakespeare uses, when he desires to express the service to which
his favorite hero, Prince Hal, will put the manners of his wild
companions:--

"So, like gross terms,
The Prince will, in the perfectness of time,
Cast off his followers; and their memory
Shall as a _pattern or a measure_ live
By which his Grace must mete the lives of
others."

2 _Henry IV._, Act iv. Sc. 4.

And in writing one of his earliest plays, Shakespeare's mind seems to
have been still so impressed with memories of his former vocation, that
he made the outraged Valentine, as his severest censure of Proteus,
reproach him with being badly dressed:--

"Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch!
Thou friend _of an ill fashion!_"

Act v. Sc. 4.

Cleopatra, too, who, we may be sure from her conduct, was addicted to
very "low necks," after Antony's death becomes serious, and declares her
intention to have something "after the high Roman fashion." And what but
a reminiscence of the disgust which a tailor of talent has for mending
is it that breaks out in the Barons' defiant message to King John?--

"The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;
We will not line his thin bestained cloak."

_King John_, Act iv. Sc. 3.

A memory, too, of the profuse adornment with which he had been called
upon to decorate some very tender youth's or miss's fashionable suit
intrudes itself even in his most thoughtful tragedy:--

"The canker galls the infants of the Spring
Too oft before their _buttons_ be disclos'd."

_Hamlet_, Act i. Sc. 3.

In "Macbeth," desiring to pay the highest compliment to Macduff's
judgment and knowledge, he makes Lennox say,--

"He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
_The fits of the season_."--Act iv. Sc. 2.

Not the last fall or last spring style, be it observed, but that of the
season, which it is most necessary for the fashionable tailor to know.
In writing the first scene of the "Second Part of Henry IV.," his mind
was evidently crossed by the shade of some over-particular dandy,
whose fastidious nicety as to the set of his garments he had failed to
satisfy; for he makes Northumberland compare himself to a man who,

"_Impatient of his