I am he that makes the Glory of Solomon: yea, and Maker of the Upper and the Nether Glory.
The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfashionable men, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when a garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes, and could probably be bought ready-to-wear.
But one can no more think of a full-blown civilization without tailors than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example, the contemporary _Saturday Evening Post_ would publish its Exclusive Saturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions. Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to Adam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the first customer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little dressmaker.' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--an impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the sexes that the world lost and is now slowly regaining.
Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxious handicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be happy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone many changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock Pants, yes even those once seemingly eternal lines,--
When the pant-hunter pantless Is panting for pants,--
are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He may, if such is his inclination,--as I am sure it would have been Adam's,--get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax, the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each as much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him to a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the plausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leaders of men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going to the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and take your choice.