BEAU BRUMMELL

Two popular Sciences.—­’Buck Brummell’ at Eton.—­Investing his Capital.—­ Young Cornet Brummell.—­The Beau’s Studio.—­The Toilet.—­’Creasing Down.’—­Devotion to Dress.—­A Great Gentleman.—­Anecdotes of Brummell.—­ ’Don’t forget, Brum:  Goose at Four!’—­Offers of Intimacy resented.—­Never in love.—­Brummell out Hunting.—­Anecdote of Sheridan and Brummell.—­The Beau’s Poetical Efforts.—­The Value of a Crooked Sixpence.—­The Breach with the Prince of Wales.—­’Who’s your Fat Friend?’—­The Climax is reached.—­The Black-mail of Calais.—­George the Greater and George the Less.—­An Extraordinary Step.—­Down the Hill of Life.—­A Miserable Old Age.—­In the Hospice Du Bon Sauveur.—­O Young Men of this Age, be warned!

It is astonishing to what a number of insignificant things high art has been applied, and with what success.  It is the vice of high civilization to look for it and reverence it, where a ruder age would only laugh at its employment.  Crime and cookery, especially, have been raised into sciences of late, and the professors of both received the amount of honour due to their acquirements.  Who would be so naive as to sneer at the author of ‘The Art of Dining?’ or who so ungentlemanly as not to pity the sorrows of a pious baronet, whose devotion to the noble art of appropriation was shamefully rewarded with accommodation gratis on board one of Her Majesty’s transport-ships?  The disciples of Ude have left us the literary results of their studies, and one at least, the graceful Alexis Soyer, is numbered among our public benefactors.  We have little doubt that as the art, vulgarly called ‘embezzlement,’ becomes more and more fashionable, as it does every day, we shall have a work on the ’Art of Appropriation.’  It is a pity that Brummell looked down upon literature:  poor literature! it had a hard struggle to recover the slight, for we are convinced there is not a work more wanted than the ‘Art of Dressing,’ and ‘George the Less’ was almost the last professor of that elaborate science.

If the maxim, that ‘whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well,’ hold good, Beau Brummell must be regarded in the light of a great man.  That dressing is worth doing at all, everybody but a Fiji Islander seems to admit, for everybody does it.  If, then, a man succeeds in dressing better than anybody else, it follows that he is entitled to the most universal admiration.

But there was another object to which this great man condescended to apply the principles of high art—­I mean affectation.  How admirably he succeeded in this his life will show.  But can we doubt that he is entitled to our greatest esteem and heartiest gratitude for the studies he pursued with unremitting patience in these two useful branches, when we find that a prince of the blood delighted to honour, and the richest, noblest, and most distinguished men of half a century ago were proud to know him?  We are writing, then, of no common man, no mere beau, but of the greatest professor of two of the most popular sciences—­Dress and Affectation.  Let us speak with reverence of this wonderful genius.