Lord Chesterfield advises his son not to allow his upper man to doff his livery, though this valet was to attend his person, when the toilet was a serious avocation requiring a more delicate hand and a nicer person than he who was to walk before his chair, or climb behind his coach.  This searching genius of philosophy and les petites moeurs solemnly warned that if ever this man were to cast off the badge of his order, he never would resume it.  About this period the masters were menaced by a sort of servile war.  The famous farce of High Life below Stairs exposed with great happiness the impudence and the delinquencies of the parti-coloured clans.  It roused them into the most barefaced opposition; and, as ever happens to the few who press unjust claims on the many, in the result worked the reform they so greatly dreaded.[A] One of the grievances in society was then an anomalous custom, for it was only practised in our country, of a guest being highly taxed in dining with a family whose establishment admitted of a numerous train.  Watchful of the departure of the guest, this victim had to pass along a line of domestics, arranged in the hall, each man presenting the visitor with some separate article, of hat, gloves, coat and cane, claiming their “vails.”  It would not have been safe to refuse even those who, with nothing to present, still held out the hand, for their attentions to the diner-out.[B]

[Footnote A:  The farce was produced in 1759, when it was the custom to admit any servant in livery free to the upper gallery, as they were supposed to be in attendance on their masters.  Their foibles and dishonesty being so completely hit off in the play incensed them greatly; and they created such an uproar that it was resolved to exclude them in future.  In Edinburgh the opposition to the play produced still greater scenes of violence, and the lives of some of the performers were threatened.  It at last became necessary for their masters to stop this outbreak on the part of their servants; and alter the whole system of the household economy which led to such results.—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  These vails, supposed to be the free gratuity of the invited to the servants of the inviter, were ultimately so managed that persons paid servants by that mode only—­levying a kind of black-mail on their friends, which ran through all society.  “The wages are nothing,” says a noble lady’s servant in one of Smollet’s novels, “but the vails are enormous.”  The consequence was, that masters and mistresses had little control over them; they are said in some instances to have paid for their places, as some servants do at inns, where the situation was worth having, owing to the large parties given, and gaming, then so prevalent, being well-attended.  It was ended by a mutual understanding all over the three kingdoms, after the riots which resulted from the production of the play noted above.—­ED.]