the “last of the dandies”.  All the money he had—­and he had very little of it—­he spent in dandification.  But he never moved with the times.  His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young men were “lions,” and when the quarrel between classicism and romanticism was vital.  He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism, with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so largely affect to despise.

Poor Beau Brummell.  After having played his small part on life’s stage, his thin shade still occasionally wanders across the boards of the theatre.  Blanchard Jerrold wrote a play upon him, which was acted at the Lyceum Theatre in 1859, when Emery played the title role.  Jerrold’s play, which has for sub-title “The King of Calais,” treats of that period in Brummell’s life in which he had retired across the channel to live upon black-mail and to drift into that Consulship at Caen which he so queerly resigned, to end a poor madman, trying to shave his own peruke.  Jerrold’s is a grim play; either it or a version on the same lines of Brummell’s fall is being played across the Atlantic at this very hour by Mr. Mansfield whose study of the final decay and idiotcy of the famous beau is said to rival the impressiveness of his Mr. Hyde.  Beau Brummell is never likely to be quite forgotten.  Folly often brings with it a kind of immortality.  The fool who fired the Temple of Ephesus has secured his place in history with Aristides and Themistocles; the fop who gave a kind of epic dignity to neck-clothes, and who asked the famous “Who’s your fat friend?” question, is remembered as a figure of that age which includes the name of Sheridan and the name of Burke.

Another and a no less famous Beau steps to salute us from the pages of the Whartons.  Beau Nash is an old friend of ours in fiction, an old friend in the drama.  Our dear old Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel about him yesterday; to-day he figures in the pages of one of the most attractive of Mr. Lewis Wingfield’s attractive stories.  He found his way on to the stage under the care of Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834.  There is a charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so “high fantastical” in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal verities contained in the clothes’ philosophy of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh of Weissnichtwo.  Their wigs were more important than their wit; the pattern of their waistcoats more important than the composition of their hearts; all morals, all philosophy are absorbed for them in the engrossing question of the fit of their breeches.  D’Artois is of their kin, French d’Artois who helped to ruin the Old Order and failed to re-create it as Charles the Tenth, d’Artois whom Mercier describes as being poured into his faultlessly fitting breeches by the careful and united efforts of no less than four valets de chambre.  But the English dandies were better than the Frenchman, for they did harm only to themselves, while he helped to ruin his cause, his party, and his king.