trading usurers. At the coronation of James the First, I find a simple knight whose cloak cost him five hundred pounds; but this was not uncommon.* At the marriage of Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, "Lady Wotton had a gown of which the embroidery cost fifty pounds a yard. The Lady Arabella made four gowns, one of which cost 15007. The Lord Montacute (Montague) bestowed 15007. in apparel for his two daughters. One lady, under the rank of baroness, was furnished with jewels exceeding one hundred thousand pounds; "and the Lady Arabella goes beyond her," says the letter-writer. "All this extreme costs and riches makes us all poor," as he imagined!† I have been amused in observing grave writers of state-dispatches jocular on any mischance or mortification to which persons are liable whose happiness entirely depends on their dress. Sir Dudley Carleton, our minister at Venice, communicates, as an article worth transmitting, the great disappointment incurred by Sir Thomas Glover, "who was just come hither, and had appeared one day like a comet, all in crimson velvet and beaten gold, but had all his expectations marred on a sudden by the news of Prince Henry's death." A similar mischance, from a different cause, was the lot of Lord Hay, who made great preparations for his embassy to France, which, however, were chiefly confined to his dress. He was to remain there twenty days; and the letterwriter maliciously observes, that "He goes with twenty special suits of apparel for so many days' abode, besides his travelling robes; but news is very lately come that the French have lately altered their fashion, whereby he must needs be out

*The famous Puritanic writer, Philip Stubbes, who published his "Anatomie of Abuses" in 1593, declares that he has heard of shirtes that have cost some ten shillings, some twentie, some fortie, some five pound, some twentie nobles, and (which is horrible to heare) some tenne pounde a peece." His book is filled with similar denunciations of abuses; in which he is followed by other satirists. They appear to have produced little effect in the way of reformation; for in the days of James I. John Taylor, the Water poet, similarly laments the wastefulness of those whoWear a farm in shoe-strings edged with gold,

And spangled garters worth a copyhold;
A hose and doublet which a lordship cost;

A gaudy cloak, three manors' price almost;

A beaver band and feather for the head

Priced at the church's tythe, the poor man's bread.

It is not unusual to find in inventories of this era, the household effects rated at much less than the wearing apparel, of the person whose property is thus valued.

of countenance, if he be not set out after the last edition!" To find himself out of fashion, with twenty suits for twenty days, was a mischance his lordship had no right to count on!

"The glass of fashion" was unquestionably held up by two very eminent characters, Rawleigh and Buckingham; and the authentic facts recorded of their dress will sufficiently account for the frequent "Proclamations" to control that servile herd of imitators-the smaller gentry!

There is a remarkable picture of Sir Walter, which will at least serve to convey an idea of the gaiety and splendour of his dress. It is a white satin pinked vest, close sleeved to the wrist; over the body a brown doublet, finely flowered and embroidered with pearl. In the feather of his hat a large ruby and pearl drop at the bottom of the sprig, in place of a button; his trunk or breeches, with his stockings and riband garters, fringed at the end, all white, and buff shoes with white riband. Oldys, who saw this picture, has thus described the dress of Rawleigh. But I have some important additions; for I find that Rawleigh's shoes on great court days were so gorgeously covered with precious stones, as to have exceeded the value of six thousand six hundred pounds: and that he had a suit of armour of solid silver, with sword and belt blazing with diamonds, rubies, and pearls, whose value was not so easily calculated. Rawleigh had no patrimonial inheritance; at this moment he had on his back a good portion of a Spanish galleon, and the profits of a monopoly of trade he was carrying on with the newly discovered Virginia. Probably he placed all his hopes in his dress! The virgin queen, when she issued proclamations against "the excess of apparel,' pardoned, by her looks, that promise of a mine which blazed in Rawleigh's; and, parsimonious as she was, forgot the three thousand changes of dresses which she herself left in the royal wardrobe.

Buckingham could afford to have his diamonds tacked so loosely on, that when he chose to shake a few off on the ground, he obtained all the fame he desired from the pickersup, who were generally les dames de la cour; for our duke never condescended to accept what he himself had dropped. His cloaks were trimmed with great diamond buttons, and diamond hatbands, cockades, and ear-rings yoked with great ropes and knots of pearls. This was, however, but for ordinary dances. "He had twenty-seven suits of clothes made, the richest that embroidery, lace, silk, velvet, silver, gold, and gems

could contribute; one of which was a white uncut velvet, set all over, both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at fourscore thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck all over with diamonds, as were also his sword, girdle, hat, and spurs.' In the masques and banquets with which Buckingham entertained the court, he usually expended, for the evening, from one to five thousand pounds. To others I leave to calculate the value of money: the sums of this gorgeous wastefulness, it must be recollected, occurred before this million age of ours.

If, to provide the means for such enormous expenditure, Buckingham multiplied the grievances of monopolies; if he pillaged the treasury for his eighty thousand pounds' coat; if Rawleigh was at length driven to his last desperate enterprise to relieve himself of his creditors for a pair of six thousand pounds' shoes-in both these cases, as in that of the chivalric Sandricourt, the political economist may perhaps acknowledge that there is a sort of luxury highly criminal. All the arguments he may urge, all the statistical accounts he may calculate, and the healthful state of his circulating medium among "the merchants, embroiderers, silkmen, and jewellers"-will not alter such a moral evil, which leaves an eternal taint on "the wealth of nations!" It is the principle that "private vices are public benefits," and that men may be allowed to ruin their generations without committing any injury to society.

DISCOVERIES OF SECLUDED MEN.

THOSE who are unaccustomed to the labours of the closet are unacquainted with the secret and silent triumphs obtained in the pursuits of studious men. That aptitude, which in poetry is sometimes called inspiration, in knowledge we may call sagacity; and it is probable that the vehemence of the one does not excite more pleasure than the still tranquillity of the other they are both, according to the strict signification of the Latin term from whence we have borrowed ours of invention, a finding out, the result of a combination which no other has formed but ourselves.

I will produce several remarkable instances of the felicity

*The Jesuit Drexelius, in one of his Religious Dialogues, notices the fact ; but I am referring to an Harleian manuscript, which confirms the infor mation of the Jesuit.

of this aptitude of the learned in making discoveries which could only have been effectuated by an uninterrupted intercourse with the objects of their studies, making things remote and dispersed familiar and present.*

One of ancient date is better known to the reader than those I am preparing for him. When the magistrates of Syracuse were showing to Cicero the curiosities of the place, he desired to visit the tomb of Archimedes; but, to his sur prise, they acknowledged that they knew nothing of any such tomb, and denied that it ever existed. The learned Cicero, convinced by the authorities of ancient writers, by the verses of the inscription which he remembered, and the circumstance of a sphere with a cylinder being engraven on it, requested them to assist him in the search. They conducted the illustrious but obstinate stranger to their most ancient buryingground: amidst the number of sepulchres, they observed a small column overhung with brambles-Cicero, looking on while they were clearing away the rubbish, suddenly exclaimed, "Here is the thing we are looking for!" His eye had caught the geometrical figures on the tomb, and the inscription soon confirmed his conjecture. Cicero long after exulted in the triumph of this discovery. "Thus!" he says, "one of the noblest cities of Greece, and once the most learned, had known nothing of the monument of its most deserving and ingenious citizen, had it not been discovered to them by a native of Arpinum!"

The great French antiquary, Peiresc, exhibited a singular combination of learning, patient thought, and luminous sagacity, which could restore an "airy nothing" to "a local habitation and a name." There was found on an amethyst, and the same afterwards occurred on the front of an ancient temple, a number of marks, or indents, which had long perplexed inquirers, more particularly as similar marks or indents were frequently observed in ancient monuments. It was agreed on, as no one could understand them, and all would be satisfied, that they were secret hieroglyphics. It occurred to Peiresc that these marks were nothing more than holes for small nails, which had formerly fastened little

* The remarkable clue to the reading of the hieroglyphic language of ancient Egypt perfected in our own times is a striking instance of this; as well as the investigations now proceeding in Babylonian inscriptions, which promise to enable us to comprehend a language that was once considered as hopelessly lost.

lamine, which represented so many Greek letters. This hint of his own suggested to him to draw lines from one hole to another; and he beheld the amethyst reveal the name of the sculptor, and the frieze of the temple the name of the god! This curious discovery has been since frequently applied; but it appears to have originated with this great antiquary, who by his learning and sagacity explained a supposed hieroglyphic, which had been locked up in the silence of seventeen centuries.*

Learned men, confined to their study, have often rectified the errors of travellers; they have done more, they have found out paths for them to explore, or opened seas for them to navigate. The situation of the vale of Tempe had been mistaken by modern travellers; and it is singular, observes the Quarterly Reviewer, yet not so singular as it appears to that elegant critic, that the only good directions for finding it had been given by a person who was never in Greece. Arthur Browne, a man of letters of Trinity College, Dublin—it is gratifying to quote an Irish philosopher and man of letters, from the extreme rarity of the character-was the first to detect the inconsistencies of Pococke and Busching, and to send future travellers to look for Tempe in its real situation, the defiles between Ossa and Olympus; a discovery subsequently realised. When Dr. Clarke discovered an inscription purporting that the pass of Tempe had been fortified by Cassius Longinus, Mr. Walpole, with equal felicity, detected, in Cæsar's "History of the Civil War," the name and the mission of this very person.

A living geographer, to whom the world stands deeply indebted, does not read Herodotus in the original; yet, by the exercise of his extraordinary aptitude, it is well known that he has often corrected the Greek historian, explained obscurities in a text which he never read, by his own happy conjectures, and confirmed his own discoveries by the subsequent knowledge which modern travellers have afforded.

Gray's perseverance in studying the geography of India and of Persia, at a time when our country had no immediate interests with those ancient empires, would have been placed by a cynical observer among the curious idleness of a mere

The curious reader may view the marks, and the manner in which the Greek characters were made out, in the preface to Hearne's "Curious Discourses." The amethyst proved more difficult than the frieze, from the circumstance, that in engraving on the stone the letters must be reversed.