[Footnote 11:  Mr. William Thomas, the writer of this statement, heard it from Dr. Radcliffe at the table of Speaker Harley, (afterwards Earl of Oxford,) 16th June, 1702.]

[Footnote 12:  See De Grammont’s Memoirs.]

    BEAU FIELDING.

  On Wits and Beaux.—­Scotland Yard in Charles II.’s day.—­Orlando of
      ’The Tatler.’—­Beau Fielding, Justice of the Peace.—­Adonis in
      Search of a Wife.—­The Sham Widow.—­Ways and Means.—­Barbara
      Villiers, Lady Castlemaine.—­Quarrels with the King.—­The
      Beau’s Second Marriage.—­The Last Days of Fops and Beaux.

Let us be wise, boys, here’s a fool coming, said a sensible man, when he saw Beau Nash’s splendid carriage draw up to the door.  Is a beau a fool?  Is a sharper a fool?  Was Bonaparte a fool?  If you reply ‘no’ to the last two questions, you must give the same answer to the first.  A beau is a fox, but not a fool—­a very clever fellow, who, knowing the weakness of his brothers and sisters in the world, takes advantage of it to make himself a fame and a fortune.  Nash, the son of a glass-merchant—­Brummell, the hopeful of a small shopkeeper—­became the intimates of princes, dukes, and fashionables; were petty kings of Vanity Fair, and were honoured by their subjects.  In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the realm of folly, the sharper is a monarch.  The only proviso is, that the cheat come not within the jurisdiction of the law.  Such a cheat is the beau or dandy, or fine gentleman, who imposes on his public by his clothes and appearance. Bona-fide monarchs have done as much:  Louis XIV. won himself the title of Le Grand Monarque by his manners, his dress, and his vanity.  Fielding, Nash, and Brummell did nothing more.  It is not a question whether such roads to eminence be contemptible or not, but whether their adoption in one station of life be more so than in another.  Was Brummell a whit more contemptible than ‘Wales?’ Or is John Thomas, the pride and glory of the ‘Domestics’ Free-and-Easy,’ whose whiskers, figure, face, and manner are all superb, one atom more ridiculous than your recognized beau?  I trow not.  What right, then, has your beau to a place among wits?  I fancy Chesterfield would be much disgusted at seeing his name side by side with that of Nash in this volume; yet Chesterfield had no objection, when at Bath, to do homage to the king of that city, and may have prided himself on exchanging pinches from diamond-set snuff-boxes with that superb gold-laced dignitary in the Pump-room.  Certainly, people who thought little of Philip Dormer Stanhope, thought a great deal of the glass-merchant’s reprobate son when he was in power, and submitted without a murmur to his impertinences.  The fact is, that the beaux and the wits are more intimately connected than the latter would care to own:  the wits have all been, or aspired to be, beaux, and beaux have had their fair share of wit; both lived