Page:Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets.djvu/241

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Thomas Dekker
221

because your artificiall fooles beare away the bell, all our best workmanship (at this time) shall be spent to fashion such a Creature.


CHAPTER I

The old world, & the new weighed together: the Tailors of those times, and these compared: the apparell, and dyet of our first fathers.

Good cloathes are the embrodred trappings of pride, and good cheere the very eringo-roote of gluttony: so that fine backes, and fat bellyes are Coach-horses to two of the seuen deadly sins: In the bootes of which Coach, Lechery and Sloth sit like the waiting-maide. In a most desperate state therefore doe Taylors, and Cookes stand, by meanes of their offices: for both those trades are Apple-squires to that couple of sinnes. The one inuents more phantasticke fashions, then Fraunce hath worne since her first stone was laid; the other more lickerish epycurean dishes, then were euer serud vp to Gallonius table. Did man (thinke you) come wrangling into the world, about no better matters, then all his lifetime to make priuy searches in Burchin lane for Whalebone doublets, or for pies of Nightingale tongues in Heliogabalus his kitchin? No, no, the first suit of apparell, that euer mortall man put on, came neither from the Mercers