the case may be; no! uncompromising bone,
or severe cloth, a plainness that is puritanism,
and simplicity that is hardness, mark the buttons
of the strong-minded woman; and by her buttons
you may judge her.

The strong-minded woman's husband, too,
may be known by his buttons—not for their
beauty, but for their imperfectness. They are
never as they should be: they are never fast,
never whole, never regular; they lie at all sorts
of uncertain distances; and some of them—
the mother-o'-pearl—broken across the middle;
others—those aggravating linen things—worn
at the edges, ragged, frayed, and disreputable.
Half of them are wanting altogether, and the
other half are not fit to be seen. And these
are the signs by which you may know the
husband of the strong-minded woman and of the
slattern alike; as well as the reckless bachelor
not set up in studs, and living on the mercy of
his laundress. The poor neglected bachelor and
his buttons! But the theme is getting out of
date now, for the mechanically fastened buttons
have beaten the older kinds out of the field, and,
woe the day for the spinsterhood of England!
have made men independent of women, and no
longer constrained by the power of shirt-buttons.
Yet, there are still some few remaining—some
of the more tenacious and conservative sort—
who cling to the mother-o'-pearl and the art of
sewing, and who thus bear about on their persons,
strongly marked, the sign and seal of their
position with respect to women. These are the
men who are sure to marry on the first
opportunity. Studs and patent bolts are shy, but
linen and mother-o'-pearl safe. Yes, safe! even
if there is a sister in the house; for a sister's
button-sewing and a wife's are very different
things. The first sews on her gross from honour,
womanly pride, and the dignity of her sex; the
other from duty, sweetened sometimes with
love. It is all the difference between a machine
and a human being; so at least said once to me
a man who had both, and who therefore ought
to know.

There are many odd circumstances connected
with buttons, and perhaps no single article of
commerce has been made more account of by the
legislature. The button world has been ruled
and regulated like a pampered child, and acts
and bills by the dozen have been passed, ordering
what kinds of buttons should be worn, and what
kinds discarded, and on what false principles
Birmingham buttons should he protected, and
every other kind of button manufacture
prohibited. In the reigns of Charles the Second,
and William and Mary, foreign buttons were not
to be imported under a penalty of one hundred
pounds by the importer, and fifty pounds by the
seller; William the Third fulminated against
wooden buttons, also against buttons of cloth or
stuff; Anne demanded that "no tailor, or other
person, shall make, sell, set on, use, or bind, on
any clothes any button or button-holes of cloth,
&c., on pain of five pounds a dozen;" and
George the First followed in the same track.
Indeed, the thing got to be such a nuisance, that
the Gentleman's Magazine took it up, and in the
pretended minutes of the proceedings in the
Senate of Lilliput, tried what ridicule would do,
since common sense had failed. It was in
seventeen hundred and twenty-one that the most
stringent laws against cloth buttons were
passed, for the encouragement of the metal
trade, and these were carried to such a height
that a tailor could not obtain payment of a coat
which he had made with cloth buttons. The
question was tried, and the tailor cast as a
misdemeanant and law-breaker. In fact, all clothes
with cloth buttons on them, exposed for sale,
might be seized and forfeited; and even a private
person, if he wore cloth buttons or bound button-
holes, might be informed against and fined forty
shillings a dozen: half of the money to go to
the informer. So the metal button manufacturer
lifted his head high as one of the privileged
and protected of the land; while his poor little
cloth rival was obliged to smuggle himself into
political existence before he could be received
and recognised. Those metal buttons had a
certain currency value, too, for during the long
war the shanks used to be cut off and the
moulds passed as halfpence, to the confusion of
a man's finances and the detriment of his
wardrobe.

It would be difficult now-a-days to make any
such use of the modern button, for there is
scarcely a single article of manufacture which
does not yield buttons among its list of articles.
There are glass buttons, and porcelain buttons,
linen buttons, thread and bone; there are mother-
o'-pearl, bronze, steel, cast-iron, brass, wood,
mock jewel and real, coral, coal, marble, and
gutta-percha; there are silk, and cloth, and
velvet, and lace; there are aluminum, and zinc,
silver, gold, copper, and tin. There is scarcely
a subject to be named, putting out the fatty
materials, which cannot be transmuted into
buttons, and after which the public does not
run with frantic eagerness. This has always
been true of the button trade; and this is how
a clever man once put it: "This beautiful
ornament appears with infinite variation; and
though the original date is rather uncertain, yet
we well remember the long coats of our
grandfathers, covered with half a gross of high-tops,
and the cloaks of our grandmothers, ornamented
with a horn button, nearly the size of a crown-
piece, a watch, or a john-apple, as having passed
through the Birmingham press. Though the
common round button keeps on with the steady
pace of the day, yet we sometimes see the oval,
the square, and the pea, the concave and the
pyramid, start into existence. In some branches
of traffic the wearer calls loudly for new
fashions; but in this the fashions tread upon
each other, and crowd upon the wearer." What
would any one say now, if suddenly awakened
from the contemplation of high-tops, and
buttons like john-apples as the last perfection
possible to the fashion, and transported before that
shop-window in Regent-street, where every
kind, form, colour, and size, appeal to some one's
taste, and tempt some one's open purse? Flies,