leather and prunella

English

Etymology

With reference to leather and prunella (materials used for making shoes and apparel), from a passage in Alexander Pope’s 1734 poem “An Essay on Man”: “What differ more (you cry) than Crown and Cowl?” / I’ll tell you, Friend: a wise Man and a Fool. / You’ll find, if once the Monarch acts the Monk, / Or Cobler-like the Parson will be drunk, / Worth makes the Man, and want of it the Fellow, / The rest is all but Leather or Prunello^[1].

Noun

leather and prunella (uncountable)

1. (archaic) That which is merely superficial and does not indicate the true nature or value of a person (or thing). [Late 18^th to early 20^th c.]
   • 1818, Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, chapter 1, in Marriage‎^[2], volume 2, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, published 1819, pages 5-6:

     In the modern languages she was perfectly skilled; and if her drawings wanted the enliving touches of the master to give them effect; as an atonement, they displayed a perfect knowledge of the rules of perspective and the study of the bust. ¶ All this was however mere leather and prunella to the ladies of Glenfern […]

   • 1872, George Eliot, Middlemarch‎^[3], Edinburgh: William Blackwood, Volume 3, Book 5, Chapter 43, p. 13:

     “ […] Do you think he disliked her seeing him at our house? Surely your position is more than equal to his—whatever may be his relation to the Casaubons.” ¶ “No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed. Ladislaw is a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella.”

   • 1880, Benjamin Disraeli, letter to Lord Salisbury, cited in Richard Faber, Beaconsfield and Bolingbroke, London: Faber and Faber, 1961, p. 19,^[4]

     […] I have been profoundly convinced that the greatness and character of this country depended on our landed tenure. All the rest I look upon, and have ever looked upon, as leather and prunella.

   • 1885 May, Oscar Wilde, “Shakespeare and Stage Costume”, in The Nineteenth Century‎^[5], volume 17, page 800:

     […] it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costume of his actors, and that, could he see Mr. Irving’s production of his Much Ado about Nothing, or Mr. Wilson Barrett’s setting of his Hamlet, he would probably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella.

   • 1931, George Saintsbury, A Consideration of Thackeray, London: Humphrey Milford, Chapter 17, p. 257,^[6]

     that leather-and-prunella man of fashion Mr. Adam FitzAdam