to exchange snuff-boxes, and George the Greater had given George the Less an order on his jeweller for a tabatiere with his portrait on the top.  On their quarrel this order was, with very bad taste, rescinded, although Brummell’s snuff-box had already passed into the Prince’s hands and had not been returned.  It is said that the Beau employed a friend to remind the king of this agreement, and ask for his box; to whom the latter said that the story was all nonsense, and that he supposed ‘the poor devil,’ meaning his late intimate friend, wanted L100 and should have it.  However, it is doubtful if the money ever reached the ‘poor devil.’  The story does not tell over well, for whatever were the failings and faults of George IV., he seems to have had a certain amount of good nature, if not absolutely of good heart, and possessed, at least, sufficient sense of what became a prince, to prevent his doing so shabby an act, though he may have defrauded a hundred tradesmen.  In these days there were such things as ‘debts of honour,’ and they were punctiliously attended to.  There are, as we have said, various versions of this story, but all tend to show that Brummell courted the notice of his late master and patron on his way through the place of his exile; and it is not remarkable in a man who borrowed so freely from all his acquaintances, and who was, in fact, in such a state of dependence on their liberality.

Brummell made one grand mistake in his career as a Beau:  he outlived himself.  For some twenty-four years he survived his flight from England, to which country he never returned.  For a time he was an assiduous writer of begging-letters and the plague of his friends.  At length he obtained the appointment of consul at the good old Norman town of Caen.  This was almost a sinecure, and the Beau took care to keep it so.  But no one can account for the extraordinary step he took soon after entering on his consular duties.  He wrote to Lord Palmerston, stating that there were no duties attached to the post, and recommending its abolition.  This act of suicide is partly explained by a supposed desire to be appointed to some more lively and more lucrative consulate; but in this the Beau was mistaken.  The consulate at Caen was vacated in accordance with his suggestion, and Brummell was left penniless, in debt, and to shift for himself.  With the aid of an English tradesman, half grocer, half banker, he managed to get through a period of his poverty, but could not long subsist in this way, and the punishment of his vanity and extravagance came at last in his old age.  A term of existence in prison did not cure him, and when he was liberated he again resumed his primrose gloves, his Eau de Cologne, and his patent vernis for his boots, though at that time literally supported by his friends with an allowance of L120 per annum.  In the old days of Caen life this would have been equal to L300 a year in England, and certainly quite enough for any bachelor; but the Beau was really