I can truly say that I never spent a quarter of an hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the agreeable discussions which are always going on there.] This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should have mentioned it.

Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from the _hypochondriacal_ or _windy_ to the _heroical_ or _love-melancholy_, has strangely omitted it.
Shakspeare himself has overlooked it.

"I have neither the scholar's melancholy (saith Jaques), which is emulation; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is politic; nor the lover's, which is all these:" and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, "nor the tailor's, which is," so and so, he comes to an end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own melancholy.
Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of bringing it in, in his _Penseroso_.
But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavor to ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant in people of this profession above all others.
And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain _seriousness_ (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel has been intrusted, to keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing remonstrance against those vanities which the absurd conversion of a memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to produce?
Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the caballistic language of his order is said to have _certain melancholy_ regions always open under his feet .-- But waiving further inquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy.
I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some subordinate ones, viz.: The sedentary habits of the tailor .-- Something peculiar in his diet .-- First, his _sedentary habits_ .-- In Dr.Norris's famous narrative of the frenzy of Mr.John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to the occasion of the swelling in his legs, replies that it came "by criticism;" to which the learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a distemper which he had never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have been mad upon all subjects) rejoins, with some warmth, that it was no distemper, but a noble art; that he had sat fourteen hours a day at it; and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that there was a communication between the brain and the legs.
When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously, which the critic probably practised only while he was writing his "remarks," is no more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of his art, submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year, shall we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner overclouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between the noble and less noble parts of the body which Dennis hints at?
The unnatural and painful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, insomuch that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their boards to so many envious Junos, _sitting cross-legged to hinder the birth of their own felicity_.

The legs transversed thus [Illustration: X lying on its side] crosswise, or decussated, was among the ancients the posture of malediction.

The Turks, who practise it at this day, are noted to be a melancholy people.
Secondly, his _diet_ .-- To which purpose I find a most remarkable passage in Burton, in his chapter entitled "Bad diet a cause of melancholy." "Amongst herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, disallowed; but especially CABBAGE.