advantage, as well as a strict observance after times and fashions.

I have with much pains and reading collected out of ancient authors
this short summary of a body of philosophy and divinity which seems
to have been composed by a vein and race of thinking very different
from any other systems, either ancient or modern. And it was not
merely to entertain or satisfy the reader's curiosity, but rather to
give him light into several circumstances of the following story,
that, knowing the state of dispositions and opinions in an age so
remote, he may better comprehend those great events which were the
issue of them. I advise, therefore, the courteous reader to peruse
with a world of application, again and again, whatever I have
written upon this matter. And so leaving these broken ends, I
carefully gather up the chief thread of my story, and proceed.

These opinions, therefore, were so universal, as well as the
practices of them, among the refined part of court and town, that
our three brother adventurers, as their circumstances then stood,
were strangely at a loss. For, on the one side, the three ladies
they addressed themselves to (whom we have named already) were ever
at the very top of the fashion, and abhorred all that were below it
but the breadth of a hair. On the other side, their father's will
was very precise, and it was the main precept in it, with the
greatest penalties annexed, not to add to or diminish from their
coats one thread without a positive command in the will. Now the
coats their father had left them were, it is true, of very good
cloth, and besides, so neatly sewn you would swear they were all of
a piece, but, at the same time, very plain, with little or no
ornament; and it happened that before they were a month in town
great shoulder-knots came up. Straight all the world was shoulder-