Selected quad for the lemma: england_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
england_n	alexander_n	year_n	young_a	76	3	7.4608	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A38449	Englands vanity or The Voice of God against the monstrous sin of pride, in dress and apparel wherein naked breasts and shoulders, antick and fantastick garbs, patches, and painting, long perriwigs, towers, bulls, shades, curlings, and crispings, with an hundred more fooleries of both sexes, are condemned as notiriously unlawful. With pertinent addresses to the court, nobility, gentry, city and country, directed especially to the professors in London / by a compassionate conformist.	Compassionate conformist.	1683 (1683)	Wing E3069; ESTC R32945	62,360	146

more exceedingly decent and graceful is the present Cut of our Gentlemen answering all the parts and members of the Body to a more Civil and proportionable end Always however be excepted the incomparable Tunick and Vest so very comely in it self so very advantageous to the Drapers of the Kingdom perhaps the most grave and manlike Dress that ever England saw which had the unhappiness to be brought in too late and the hard Fate to be sent out again too soon And would have answered all the expectations of publick Commodity pretended by the Woolen Act so that had our Gentlemen pleas'd to have danc'd in them any longer the Farmers would very cheerfully have paid the Fidlers But we can never hold when it is well such an influence hath the French Pipe to make us ca●per after them in all their Follies to our own dishonour and Ruine I mind therefore in the next place to represent to the Reader the dangers of so great a Levity Neither is Scripture silent in its menaces against so prodigious a Folly We know who hath threatned such as Cloath themselves in strange Apparel But because examples are more prevalent to work upon us I have endeavoured to look into History which hath furnished me with three or four not unworthy of the Readers most serious perusal and application Don Sebastian then King of Portugal what time this humour infected his Subjects of attiring themselves after the Castillian Fashion all the Noble Persons and Gentlemen practising nothing more than to speak the Castilian Language which it seems is very elegant and expressive with the same ambition as we do the French between whom and them there was no very natural kindness neither but a very bitter Antipathy hating the persons whose Language they lov'd It pleas'd God that Sebastian dying without issue and the Crown lying at Stake as the Golden Ball for every Pretender to venture at who but King Philip of Castile run fairest for it and with an easy stretch got it set on his head to the general sorrow but little redress of the discontented subjects To whom afterwards he proved no very Favourable Prince In the year of Christ four hundred and twenty the Grecians whose habitations bordered upon the Turks took fancy to cloath themselves after the Turkish manner they which before were wont to wear Long Beards which so very well became them quoth my Author Cut off all and left the Mustachioes onely and practic'd to follow them in all their actions till anon comes an Army of Mustachioes and subdued them to a perfect Slavery to this day Although we know their Ruine was both Prophesied and certainly determined as the dreadful punishment for Crucifying the Lord of Life Yet I find too that the Jews for about thirty years before the final destruction of their City and Temple by Titus Vespasian had gotten a custom to impose no other names upon their Children but such as were Roman nor would wear any Garments but after the Roman Guise their very Arms for War and Souldiers Cassocks were in all respect like theirs striving to imitate their Fashion and Garb very intirely whom so suddenly after they so dearly suffered under Caesar in his Commentaries hath an Observation to this very purpose That Divisions and Animosities rising up among the Gaules they began to hate each other to that degree That one Party among them separated from the other by the visible distinction of their Dress betaking themselves some to the Roman Fashion some to the Almaine and left the use of their own short habits and close Breeches Which was but as it were a prediction of the Calamity that soon after fell upon them from the Arms of those Romans whom they had so apishly followed But remarkable is the Story of the Great Darius whom several Authors affirm to us to have changed the very Fashion of his Sword from the Ancient Persian into the Macedenian Fashion but the very year before Alexander invaded and ruined him Which his Diviners interpreted truly into what afterwards came to pass That those should come to be Lords of Persia into whose Fashion Darius had altered his Sword What application shall I make of all these Stories to poor England If not onely our mens Swords and Cassocks and Perriwiggs and Boots and Breeches But our very Ladies Mantoes Petticoats Points Shoes Hoods and Laces be not of the French Fashion onely but the very Productions of the Countrey if no proper handsome young men can be picked from the Sons of our Yeomen and Inferiour Gentry to make Val de Chambres to our Gallants if no hand but a French one can serve to Trim and shave our Beards No Cut but a French Taylors to shape our Cloaths No Languge but the French to serve our Tongues no Religion but the French to content our Souls I pray you what will be the end hereof There is a disease among us called of that Name too I pray God it be not too Epidemical if it be not gotten into our Bodies sure I am 't is gotten into our Heads while we set our selve to study and contrive nothing more than to please our Fancies with the Levities of the French And how little did he merit the happiness of our good Cloth and Beef of our good Laws and Religion of our Native Immunities and happy Liberties who declared he had rather be serv'd by a French Dog than by an English-man What care and prudence hath been used formerly by other Nations for the prevention of publick detriment from the extravagancies and vain excess of Apparel I have already instanc'd from the Athenians and others from the City of Venice c. To which I will onely here adjoyn a Memoire of the Law Sumptuaria which Numa Pompilius established and which prov'd so exceedingly advantageous to the prosperity of the then Roman State Vt in exequiis Epulisque c. It was provided by that Law that all their profuse expence in Funerals and all excessive use of fine Cloths at their publick meeting and Shows should be utterly laid aside by due obedience and execution of which they quickly came to find the present Commodity and benefit by extirpating those two voracious Gulphes that swallow up the prosperity of any Kingdom that is in the World delicacy of fare and sumptuousness of Attire And to shew you what inconveniences this especially of sumptuousness of Apparel hath at all times brought to poor England I shall go back to Queen Elizabeths days and give you a remarkable Survey of it drawn by a Gentleman of good Quality and Understanding Representing it to King James in his Book dedicated to him savouring of the Language of that Age wherein he thus passionately deplored it to the King Our English-men more then any Nation of the World hath been shamefully branded among Forreigners for their disguised Fashions and sumptuous Habiliments beyond the bounds of Prudence Moderation and Hability Some women after a preposterous Fashion

tricked up in the most excessive Curiosity of Attire and I was surpriz'd when I found that Cornelius a Lapide in his Comment on Timothy has gotten the story by the end Mistress saith he vnless God give you Hell for all this Pains and Labour of Dress Verily He will do you great Injury But what said Old Plautus A Woman and a Ship are never sufficiently rigg'd up therefore said he if any Man want work or business for his mony Let him get him a Ship or a Wife Yet Plutarch tells us that Phocian the Athenian General was Singularly happy in this who when a great Lady of Jonia came to Athens to pass a visit on her and shew'd her all the Rich Jewels and Precious stones of her Cabinet But saith this Lady All my Riches and Jewels is my Husband Phocion Indeed those Athenians were a politick People and car'd very little that their women should bare away the spoiles of their Estate who therefore had Officers on purpose who were to order the Apparrel for women and to take care that no one might wear any thing unbecoming her Place or Degree and these were called Gyneconomi A Committee that sate on the Female affayrs to keep them in due Moderation and Order Very much wanted in England The like Power had the Ephori to correct the Spartan Extravagancies and I confess the Laws of Licurgus for youth especially were so choice and remarkable that the very reading of them would make us reflect on our own impudencies when as my Author tells me the very young men of the City were reduced to so high a degree of Civility and Modesty that passing through the Streets on their Lawful Occasions they would wrap themselves up in their Cloaks not stand prating to every one they met nor Gaze up and down but kept their very eyes fixt upon the ground by which means in a while the masculine Sex excelled in all bashfulness and gravity the very choicest perfections of the Feminine Their Voices were no more heard than if they had been Statues of Stone neither were the young Damosels more chast in their Chambers than were those young men as they walked in the Streets And does not this make thee blush Reader to consider the Rudeness the Incivility the Insolence the the Wild and Immodest Gestures and Deportment not of the Males only in our City but the Loosness the Staring and Gaping the Idle and Dissolute Carriage of the very Virgins and Young Ladies who set themselves out on purpose to be pick't up and Gaz'd on and turn their back upon every passenger as it were to tell him they are freely at his service Not to speak now of the swarmes of these execrable prostitutes the Plagues of the Town that have every Night their several walks and appartments to ply in you may find them as Solomon sayes not in the Corner of the Streets onely but thick in the very midst of them and turning the whole City into a Stews It were well if the like dispatch of some Ship-Loads of them were made to the Forraign Plantations as in the time of the Usurper there was And these too glittering as so many Stars all over in the sparkles of St. Martins the proper Lawful Dress of their Trade by the Lacedemonian-Law who allowed none of these Gayities to any but VVhores Nor can I but mention another most profitable Law of Licurgus who ordain'd that the young men of Sparta should have frequent meetings in some publick place where they should Eat and Drink together for a mutual increase of acquaintance and love but when assembled their chiefest discourses were ordain'd to be for the better contrivance and carrying on the prosperity and wellfare of the City on purpose saith my Author to avoid any idle or impertinent prattle and when all finish'd in due Order and Civility to depart each one to his proper home and betimes too without the Least Debauchery by VVine lest any notice should be taken of any disorder in their passage home through the Streets for Night was to be no mantle to vice no more than the day had been so as they were under an Excellent Government they should take care to honour it by as honest a Carriage What Reader does the Wilderness bring forth better fruit than the Garden We are every one striving for the Honour of the Church and the Kingdomes Let us at least take Example by these Heathen who surely were wiser in their Generation than we Is debauchery and sottishness become the true methods of Honour to so incomparable a Government we lye under and the roarings of our Taverns at midnight quite drowning the Anthems of our Church Alas when shall we begin with a faithful sobriety with these Spartanes to bring glory to the Crown and the Miter whose Honour we so passionately contend for yet suffer its Jewels to swim away in our Spew and then only to dispute for a Decipline when we have lost our sences in the draughts of intemperance and are not able to speak a plain word And further they were so farr from Pomp of Apparrel that no gain or encrease of Estate could tempt them to so vain a Superfluity they consulted the well-Ordering and Governing their Bodies more than any Exteriour magnificent Clothing and loved better to have Mony in their Purses than to lay it all out on their Backs When thou knowest Reader what a World of Byas'es appear like Princes among us yet carry all they have in the World about them as He. Long-Coats and a Drivelling-Cloth is the proper Demonstrative Garbe of a Natural and is not unbecoming for him who dresses himself up in his whole Estate and has left not a peny to dine on but is more ridiculous than Jack-Pudding who disguises himself to get some There was once a Gallant in a Velvet-Coat and a Scarlet-Cloak over it walking in Paul's where finding himself very hungry and over-hearing some others discourse of a Feast the Ironmongers held that day in their Hall was glad of that News and resolving to intrude amongst them No sooner appear'd then was courteously received and promoted by the Stewards to the best Seat at the Table as one they thought who might formerly be of the Society or at least descended from a Father that was and now had done them the Honour to Grace them with His Worshipful Company when Dinner was over and he had lay'd well about him and brisk'd up his Spirits with Wine The chiefest of the Company with whom he Convers'd were at length so bold to desire him to discover himself and what Relation he had to their Society To whom he very merrily replyed O a very near affinity to your Trade for I my self am a Monger too They pray him to explain what he meant By my troth Gentlemen since you must know I am a Whore-Monger and have wasted my Estate in my Vocation so that wanting a Dinner I supposed the contiguity of our Callings might