He was now a boy of seventeen, and a very fine boy, too.  To judge from a portrait taken in later life, he was not strictly handsome; but he is described as tall, well built, and of a slight and graceful figure.  Added to this, he had got from Eton and Oxford, if not much learning, many a well-born friend, and he was toady enough to cultivate those of better, and to dismiss those of less distinction.  He was, through life, a celebrated ‘cutter,’ and Brummell’s cut was as much admired—­by all but the cuttee—­as Brummel’s coat.  Then he had some L25,000 as capital and how could he best invest it?  He consulted no stockbroker on this weighty point; he did not even buy a shilling book of advice such as we have seen advertised for those who do not know what to do with their money.  The question was answered in a moment by the young worldling of sixteen:  he would enter a crack regiment and invest his guineas in the thousand per cents. of fashionable life.

His namesake, the Regent, was now thirty-two, and had spent those years of his life in acquiring the honorary title of the ’first gentleman of Europe’ by every act of folly, debauch, dissipation, and degradation which a prince can conveniently perpetrate.  He was the hero of London society, which adored and backbit him alternately, and he was precisely the man whom the boy Brummell would worship.  The Regent was colonel of a famous regiment of fops—­the 10th Hussars.  It was the most expensive, the most impertinent, the best-dressed, the worst-moralled regiment in the British army.  Its officers, many of them titled, all more or less distinguished in the trying campaigns of London seasons, were the intimates of the Prince-Colonel.  Brummell aspired to a cornetcy in this brilliant regiment, and obtained it; nor that alone; he secured, by his manners, o his dress, or his impudence, the favour and companionship—­ friendship we cannot say—­of the prince who commanded it.

By this step his reputation was made, and it was only necessary to keep it up.  He had an immense fund of good nature, and, as long as his money lasted, of good spirits, too.  Good sayings—­that is, witty if not wise—­ are recorded of him, and his friends pronounce him a charming companion.  Introduced, therefore, into the highest circles in England, he could scarcely fail to succeed.  Young Cornet Brummell became a great favourite with the fair.

His rise in the regiment was of course rapid:  in three years he was at the head of a troop.  The onerous duties of a military life, which vacillated between Brighton and London, and consisted chiefly in making oneself agreeable in the mess-room, were too much for our hero.  He neglected parade, or arrived too late:  it was such a bore to have to dress in a hurry.  It is said that he knew the troop he commanded only by the peculiar nose of one of the men, and that when a transfer of men had once been made, rode up to the wrong troop, and supported his mistake by pointing to the nose in question.