The batterie de toilette, we are told, was of silver, and included a spitting-dish, for its owner said ‘he could not spit into clay.’  Napoleon shaved himself, but Brummell was not quite great enough to do that, just as my Lord So-and-so walks to church on Sunday, while his neighbour, the Birmingham millionaire, can only arrive there in a chariot and pair.

His ablutions took no less than two whole hours!  What knowledge might have been gained, what good done in the time he devoted to rubbing his lovely person with a hair-glove!  Cleanliness was, in fact, Brummell’s religion; perhaps because it is generally set down as ’next to godliness,’ a proximity with which the Beau was quite satisfied, for he never attempted to pass on to that next stage.  Poor fool, he might rub every particle of moisture off the skin of his body—­he might be clean as a kitten—­but he could not and did not purify his mind with all this friction; and the man who would have fainted to see a black speck upon his shirt, was not at all shocked at the indecent conversation in which he and his companions occasionally indulged.

The body cleansed, the face had next to be brought up as near perfection as nature would allow.  With a small looking-glass in one hand, and tweezers in the other, he carefully removed the tiniest hairs that he could discover on his cheeks or chin, enduring the pain like a martyr.

Then came the shirt, which was in his palmy days changed three times a day, and then in due course the great business of the cravat.  Captain Jesse’s minute account of the process of tying this can surely be relied on, and presents one of the most ludicrous pictures of folly and vanity that can be imagined.  Had Brummell never lived, and a novelist or play-writer described the toilet which Captain Jesse affirms to have been his daily achievement, he would have had the critics about him with the now common phrase—­’This book is a tissue, not only of improbabilities, but of actual impossibilities.’  The collar, then, was so large, that in its natural condition it rose high above the wearer’s head, and some ingenuity was required to reduce it by delicate folds to exactly that height which the Beau judged to be correct.  Then came the all-majestic white neck-tie, a foot in breadth.  It is not to be supposed that Brummell had the neck of a swan or a camel—­far from it.  The worthy fool had now to undergo, with admirable patience, the mysterious process known to our papas as ‘creasing down.’  The head was thrown back, as if ready for a dentist; the stiff white tie applied to the throat, and gradually wrinkled into half its actual breadth by the slow downward movement of the chin.  When all was done, we can imagine that comfort was sacrificed to elegance, as it was then considered, and that the sudden appearance of Venus herself could not have induced the deluded individual to turn his head in a hurry.