Brummell was a distinguished beggar of this description, and managed so adroitly that the new arrivals thought themselves obliged by Mr. Brummell’s acceptance of their donations.  The man who could not eat cabbages, drive in a hackney-coach, or wear less than three shirts a day, was now supported by voluntary contributions, and did not see anything derogatory to a gentleman in their acceptance.  If Brummell had now turned his talents to account; if he had practised his painting, in which he was not altogether despicable; or his poetry, in which he had already had some trifling success:  if he had even engaged himself as a waiter at Quillacq’s, or given lessons in the art of deportment, his fine friends from town might have cut him, but posterity would have withheld its blame.  He was a beggar of the merriest kind.  While he wrote letters to friends in England, asking for remittances, and describing his wretched condition on a bed of straw and eating bran bread, he had a good barrel of Dorchester ale in his lodgings, his usual glass of maraschino, and his bottle of claret after dinner; and though living on charity, could order new snuff-boxes to add to his collection, and new knick-knacks to adorn his room.  There can be no pity for such a man, and we have no pity for him, whatever the rest of the world may feel.

Nothing can be more contemptible than the gradual downfall of the broken beau.  Yet, if it were doubted that his soul ever rose above the collar of a coat or the brim of a hat, his letters to Mr. Raikes in the time of his poverty would settle the question.  ’I heard of you the other day in a waistcoat that does you considerable credit, spick-and-span from Paris, a broad stripe, salmon-colour, and cramoise.  Don’t let them laugh you into a relapse—­into the Gothic—­as that of your former English simplicity.’  He speaks of the army of occupation as ’rascals in red coats waiting for embarkation.’  ‘English education,’ he says in another letter, ’may be all very well to instruct the hemming of handkerchiefs, and the ungainly romps of a country-dance, but nothing else; and it would be a poor consolation to your declining years to see your daughters come into the room upon their elbows, and to find their accomplishments limited to broad native phraseology in conversation, or thumping the “Woodpecker” upon a discordant spinet.’  And he proceeds to recommend a ‘good French formation of manners,’ and so forth.

Nor did he display any of that dignity and self-respect which are generally supposed to mark the ‘gentleman.’  When his late friend and foe, by this time a king, passed through Calais, the Beau, broken in every sense, had not pride enough to keep out of his way.  Many stories are told of the manner in which he pressed himself into George IV.’s notice, but the various legends mostly turn upon a certain snuff-box.  According to one quite as reliable as any other, the Prince and the Beau had in their days of amity intended