Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844

In the matter of coats Brummell had but one rival, the Prince, whose rank of course gave him a general advantage, yet whose taste was clearly held as inferior by the royal artistes themselves. A baronet, who went to Schweitzer’s to get himself equipped in the first style, asked him what cloth he recommended. “Why, sir,” was the answer, “the Prince wears superfine, and Mr Brummell the Bath coating. Suppose, sir, we say Bath coating; I think Mr Brummell has a trifle the preference.” Brummell’s connexion with the Prince, his former rank in the hussars, and his own agreeable manners, introduced him to the intercourse of the principal nobility. In the intervals of his visits to the Prince at Brighton, he visited Belvoir, Chatsworth, Woburn, &c. But he was absolutely once in town in the month of November, as is proved by the following note from Woburn:—

“My dear Brummell,—By some accident, which I am unable to account for, your letter of Wednesday did not reach me till Wednesday. I make it a rule never to lend my box; but you have the entrée libre whenever you wish to go there, as I informed the boxkeeper last year. I hope Beauvais and you will do great execution at Up-Park. I shall probably be there shortly after you.—Ever yours sincerely,

“Bedford.”

At Belvoir he was l’ami de la famille, and at Cheveley, another seat of the Duke of Rutland’s, his rooms were as sacred as the Duke of York’s, who was a frequent visitor there. On the Duke of Rutland’s coming of age, in 1799, great rejoicings took place at Belvoir, and Brummell was one of the distinguished party there, among whom were the Prince of Wales, the late Duke of Argyll, the Marquis of Lorn, and the other chief fashionable people of the day. This fête was memorable, for it was said to have cost L.60,000. Brummell was not altogether effeminate; he could both shoot and ride, but he liked neither: he was never a Melton man. He said that he could not bear to have his tops and leathers splashed by the greasy galloping farmers. The Duke of Rutland raised a corps of volunteers on the renewal of the war in 1803; and as Brummell had been a soldier the duke gave him a majority. In the course of the general inspections of the volunteer corps, an officer was sent from the Horse Guards to review the duke’s regiment, the major being in command. On the day of the inspection every one was on parade except the major-commandant. Where is Major Brummell, was the indignant enquiry? He was not to be found. The inspection went on. When it was near its close, Brummell was soon coming full gallop across the country in the uniform of the Belvoir Hunt, terribly splashed. He apologized for himself by saying, that having left Belvoir quite early, he had expected to be on the parade in time, the meet being close at hand. However, his favourite hunter had landed him in a ditch, where, having been dreadfully shaken by the fall, he had been lying for an hour. But the general was inexorable, and Brummell used to give the worthy officer’s speech in the following style—“Sir, this conduct is wholly inexcusable. If I remember right, sir, you once had the honour of holding a captain’s commission under his royal highness the Prince of Wales, the heir-apparent himself, sir! Now, sir, I tell you; I tell you sir, that I should be wanting in a proper zeal for the honour of the service; I should be wanting, sir, if I did not this very evening report this disgraceful neglect of orders to the commander-in-chief, as well as the state in which you present yourself in front of your regiment; and this shall be done, sir. You may retire, sir.”

All this was very solemn and astounding; but Brummell’s presence of mind was not often astounded. He had scarcely walked his horse a few paces from the spot, when he returned, and said in a subdued tone—“Excuse me, general; but, in my anxiety to explain this most unfortunate business, I forgot to deliver a message from the Duke of Rutland. It was to request the honour of your company at dinner.” The culprit and the disciplinarian grinned together; the general coughed, and cleared his throat sufficiently to express his thanks in these words—“Ah! why, really I feel and am very much obliged to his grace. Pray, Major Brummell, tell the duke I shall be most happy;” and melodiously   raising his voice, (for the Beau had turned his horse once more towards Belvoir,) “Major Brummell, as to this little affair, I am sure no man can regret it more than you do. Assure his grace that I shall have great pleasure in accepting his very kind invitation;” and they parted amid a shower of smiles. But Brummell had yet but half completed his performance; for the invitation was extempore, and he must gallop to Belvoir to acquaint the duke of the guest he was to receive on that day.

Brummell always appeared at the cover side, admirably dressed in a white cravat and white tops, which latter either he, or Robinson his valet, introduced, and which eventually superseded the brown ones. The subtlety of Brummell’s sneers, which made him so highly amusing to the first rank of society, made him an object of alarm if not of respect to others. “Do you see that gentleman near the door?” said a woman of rank to her daughter, who had been brought for the first time to Almack’s. “Yes! Who is he?” replied the young lady. “A person, my dear, who will probably come and speak to us; and if he enters into conversation, be careful to give him a favourable impression of you, for he is the celebrated Mr Brummell.” The debutante was the daughter of a duke. It has been said that Madame de Stael considered herself as having failed to attract his approval, and that she spoke of it as the greatest malheur which had occurred to her during her stay in London, the next in point of calamity being that the Prince had not called on her in person. The Beau perfectly knew his own value. In reply to a nobleman who charged him with involving his son in a gaming transaction, he said—“Really I did my best for the young man; I gave him my arm all the way from White’s to Watier’s.” However, there can be no doubt that he was very often intolerably impudent; and, as impudence is always vulgar, he was guilty of vulgarity. Dining at a gentleman’s house in Hampshire, where the champagne did not happen to suit his taste, he refused his glass when the servant came to help him a second time, with—“No, thank you, I don’t drink cider!” The following anecdote is rather better known. “Where were you yesterday, Brummell?” said one of his club friends. “I think,” said he, “I dined in the city.” “What! you dined in the city?” said his friend. “Yes, the man wished me to bring him into notice, and I desired him to give a dinner, to which I invited Alvanley, Mills, Pierrepoint, and some others.” “All went off well, of course?” said the friend. “Oh yes! perfectly, except one mal-à-apropos: the fellow who gave the dinner had actually the assurance to seat himself at the table.”

Dining at a large party at the house of an opulent but young member of London society, he asked the loan of his carriage to take him to Lady Jersey’s that evening. “I am going there,” said his entertainer, “and will be happy to take you.” “Still, there is a difficulty,” said Brummell in his most delicate tone. “You do not mean to get up behind, that would not be quite right in your own carriage; and yet, how would it do for me to be seen in the same carriage with you?” Brummell’s manner probably laughed off impertinences of this order; for, given without their colouring from nature, they would have justified an angry reply. But he seems never to have involved himself in personal quarrel. He was intact and intangible. Yet he, too, had his mortifications. One night, in going to Lady Dungannon’s, he was actually obliged to make use of a hackney coach. He got out of it at an unobserved distance from the door, and made his way up her ladyship’s crowded staircase, conceiving that he had escaped all evidence of his humiliation; however, this was not to be. As he was entering the drawing-room a servant touched his arm, and to his amazement and horror whispered—“Beg pardon, sir, perhaps you are not aware of it, that there is a straw sticking to your shoe.” His style found imitations in the public prints, and one sufficiently characteristic thus set forth the merits of a new patent carriage step:—“There is an art in every thing; and whatever is worthy of being learned, cannot be unworthy of a teacher.” Such was the logical argument of the professor of the art of stepping in and out of a carriage, who represented himself as much   patronised by the sublime Beau Brummell, whose deprecation of those horrid coach steps he would repeat with great delight:—

“Mr Brummell,” he used to say, “considered the sedan was the only vehicle for a gentleman, it having no steps; and he invariably had his own chair, which was lined with white satin quilted, had down squabs, and a white sheepskin rug at the bottom, brought to the door of his dressing-room, on that account always on the ground-floor, from whence it was transferred with its owner to the foot of the staircase of the house that he condescended to visit. Mr Brummell has told me,” continued the professor, “that to enter a coach was torture to him. ‘Conceive,’ said he, ‘the horror of sitting in a carriage with an iron apparatus, afflicted with the dreadful thought, the cruel apprehension, of having one’s leg crushed by the machinery. Why are not the steps made to fold outside? The only detraction from the luxury of a vis à vis, is the double distress! for both legs—excruciating idea!’”

Brummell’s first reform was the neckcloth. Even his reform has passed away; such is the transitory nature of all human achievements. But the art of neckcloths was once more than a dubious title to renown in the world of Bond Street. The politics of the time were disorderly; and the dress of politicians had become as disorderly as their principles. The fortunes of Whiggism, too, had run low; and the velvet coat and embroidered waistcoat, the costly buckles and gold buttons of better days, were heavier drains on the decreasing revenues of the party than could be long sustained with impunity. Fox had already assumed the sloven—the whole faction followed; and the ghosts of the old oppositionists, in their tie wigs and silver-laced coats, would have been horrified by the sight of the shock-headed, leather-breeched, and booted generation who howled and harangued on the left side of the Speaker’s chair from 1789 to 1806. All was canaille. Fox could scarcely have been more shabby, had he been the representative of a population of bankrupts. The remainder of the party might have been supposed, without any remarkable stretch of imagination, to have emerged from the workhouse. All was sincere squalidness, patriotic pauperism—the unwashing principle. One of the cleverest caricatures of that cleverest of caricaturists, the Scotchman Gilray, was his sketch of the Whigs preparing for their first levee after the Foxite accession on the death of Pitt. The title was, “Making decent!” The whole of the new ministry were exhibited in all the confusion of throwing off their rags, and putting on their new clothing. There stood Sheridan, half-smothered in the novel attempt to put on a clean shirt. In another corner Fox, Grey, and Lord Moira, straining to peep into the same shaving-glass, were all three making awkward efforts to use the long-forgotten razor. Others were gazing at themselves in a sort of savage wonder at the strangeness of new washed faces. Some sans culottes were struggling to get into breeches; and others, whose feet were accustomed to the ventilation of shoes which let their toes through, were pondering over the embarrassment of shoes impervious to the air. The minor apparatus of court costume scattered round on the chairs, the bags and swords, the buckles and gloves, were stared at by the groups with the wonder and perplexity of an American Indian.

Into this irregular state of things Brummell made his first stride in the spirit of a renovator. The prevailing cravat of the time was certainly deplorable. Let us give it in the words of history:—“It was without stiffening of any kind, and bagged out in front, rucking up to the front in a roll.” (We do not precisely comprehend this expression, whose precision, however, we by no means venture to doubt.) Brummell boldly met this calamity, by slightly starching the too flexible material—a change in which, as his biographer with due seriousness and truth observes—“a reasoning mind must acknowledge there is not much objectionable.”

Imitators, of course, always exceed their model, and the cravat adopted by the dandies soon became excessively starched; the test being that of raising three parts of their length by one corner without bending. Yet Brummell, though he adhered to the happy medium, and was moderate in his starch, was rigorous in his tie. If his cravat did not correspond to his   wishes in its first arrangement, it was instantly cast aside. His valet was seen one morning leaving his chamber with an armful of tumbled cravats, and on being asked the cause, solemnly replied, “These are our failures.”

Perfection is slow in all instances; but talent and diligence are sure to advance. Brummell’s “tie” became speedily the admiration of the beau monde. The manner in which this dexterous operation was accomplished was perfectly his own, and deserves to be recorded for the benefit of posterity.

The collar, which was always fixed to his shirt, was so large, that, before being folded down, it completely hid his head and face, and the neckcloth was at least a foot in height. The first coup d’archet was made with the shirt-collar, which he folded down to its proper size; but the delicate part of the performance was still to come. Brummell “standing before the glass, with his chin raised towards the ceiling, now, by the gentle and gradual declension of his lower jaw, creased the cravat to reasonable dimensions; the form of each succeeding crease being perfected with the shirt which he had just discarded.” We were not aware of the nicety which was demanded to complete the folds of this superior swathing; but, after this development, who shall pronounce a dandy idle?

Brummell was as critical on the dress of others as he was recherché in his own, and this care he extended to all ranks. He was once walking up St James’s Street, arm-in-arm with a young nobleman whom he condescended to patronize. The Beau suddenly asked him, “what he called those things on his feet.”—“Why, shoes.”—“Shoes are they?” said Brummell doubtfully, and stooping to look at them; “I thought they were slippers?”

The late Duke of Bedford asked him his opinion of a new coat. “Turn round,” said Mr Beau. When the examination was concluded in front and rear, the Beau, feeling the lapel delicately with his finger and thumb, asked in a most pathetic manner, “Bedford, do you call this thing a coat?”

Somebody told him, among a knot of loungers at White’s, “Brummell, your brother William is in town. Is he not coming here?”—“Yes,” was the reply, “in a day or two; but I have recommended him to walk the back streets till his new clothes come home.”

Practical jokes are essentially vulgar, and apt to be hazardous besides; two reasons which should have prevented their performance by an individual whose object was to be the standard of elegance, and whose object at no time was to expose himself to the rougher remonstrances of mankind; but the following piece of sportiveness was at least amusing.

Meeting an old emigré marquis at the seat of some noble friend, and probably finding the Frenchman a bore, he revenged himself by mixing some finely powdered sugar in his hair-powder. On the old Frenchman’s coming into the breakfast-room next morning, highly powdered as usual, the flies, attracted by the scent of the sugar, instantly gathered round him. He had scarcely begun his breakfast, when every fly in the room was busy on his head. The unfortunate marquis was forced to lay down his knife and fork, and take out his pocket-handkerchief to repel these troublesome assailants, but they came thicker and thicker. The victim now rose from his seat and changed his position; but all was in vain—the flies followed in fresh clusters. In despair he hurried to the window; but every fly lingering there was instantly buzzing and tickling. The marquis, feverish with vexation and surprise, threw up the window. This unlucky measure produced only a general invasion by all the host of flies sunning themselves on the lawn. The astonishment and amusement of the guests were excessive. Brummell alone never smiled. At last M. le Marquis gave way in agony, and, clapping his hands on his head, and followed by a cloud of flies, rushed out of the room. The secret was then divulged, and all was laughter.

“Poodle B—g,” so well known in the world of fashion, owed his soubriquet to Brummell. B—g was fond of letting his hair, which was light-coloured, curl round his forehead. He was one day driving in his curricle, with a poodle by his side. The Beau hailed him with—“Ah, B—g, how do you do?—A family vehicle, I see.”

Some of those oddities of expression are almost too well known now for effect; but they must have sparkled prodigiously among the exhausted circles of his West-end day.

“You seem to have caught cold, Brummell,” said a lounging visitor on hearing him cough. “Yes—I got out of my carriage yesterday, coming from the Pavilion, and the wretch of an innkeeper put me into the coffee-room with a damp stranger.”

In a stormy August—“Brummell, did any one ever see such a summer day?”—“Yes, I did, last winter.”

On returning from a country mansion, of which he happened to disapprove, he defined it “An exceedingly good house for stopping a single night in.”

On the whole, the biographer has given a tolerable selection of Brummell’s hits, some of which, however, were so intolerably impertinent, that he must have either thoroughly “known his man,” or he must have smoothed down their severity by some remarkable tone of voice or pleasantry of visage. Without those palliations, it is not easy to comprehend his occasional rudeness even to friends. One day, standing and speaking at the carriage-door of a lady, she expressed her surprise at his throwing away his time on so quiet and unfashionable a person.—“My dear friend, don’t mention it: there is no one to see us.”

But his admiration for the sex must have often brought him close on the edge of serious inconvenience. Once, at the house of a nobleman, he requested a moment’s interview in the library, and then and there communicated the formidable intelligence, “that he must immediately leave the house—on that day.”

“Why, you intended to stay a month,” said his hospitable entertainer.

“True—but I must be gone—I feel I am in love with your countess.”

“Well, my dear sir, I can’t help that. I was in love with her myself twenty years ago,” said the good-humoured husband. “But is she in love with you?”

The Beau cast down his eyes, and, in all the modesty of impudence, said faintly, “I believe she is.”

“Oh! that alters the case. I shall send for your post-horses. Good morning.”

His life was flirtation, a matter which could not be indulged in matrimony, and he therefore never married. Yet once he went so far as to elope with a young person of rank from a ball: the pair were, however, immediately overtaken. The affair was, of course, the talk of the clubs. But Brummell had his own way of wearing the willow. “On the whole,” said he, “I consider I have reason to congratulate myself. I lately heard from her favourite maid that her ladyship had been seen—to drink beer!”

Some of the Beau’s letters at this period are given; but they are not fortunate specimens of his taste: even in writing to women they are quaint, affected, and approaching to that unpardonable crime, dulness. His letters written in his wane of life, and under the realities of suffering, are much more striking, contain some pathetic and even some powerful language, and show that fashion and his own follies had obscured a mind of natural talent, if not of original tenderness.

The following letter we look upon as quite sufficient to have excluded him from the recollections of any Lady Jane on earth, if she happened to know the difference between coxcombry and common feeling:—

“My dear Lady Jane,—With the miniature, it seems, I am not to be trusted even for two pitiful hours. My own memory must be then my only disconsolate expedient to obtain a resemblance.

“As I am unwilling to merit the imputation of committing myself by too flagrant a liberty in retaining your glove, which you charitably sent at my head yesterday, as you would have extended an eleemosynary sixpence to the supplicating hat of a mendicant, I restore it to you. And, allow me to assure you, that I have too much regard and respect for you, and too little practical vanity myself, (whatever appearances may be against me,) to have entertained, for one treacherous instant, the impertinent intention to defraud you of it. You are angry, perhaps irreparably incensed against me for this petty larceny. I have no defence to offer in mitigation but that of frenzy. But you know that you are an angel visiting these sublunary spheres, and therefore your first quality should be that of mercy. Yet you are sometimes wayward and volatile in your seraphic disposition. Though   you have no wings yet you have weapons, and those are resentment and estrangement from me.—With sentiments of the deepest compunction, I am always your miserable slave,

“George Brummell.”

We have not a doubt that he perused this toilsome performance a dozen times before he folded it up, advanced to his mirror to see how so brilliant a correspondent must look after so astonishing a production, moved round the room in a minuet step; and, when he sent it away at last, followed it with a sigh at the burial of so much renown in a woman’s escritoire, and a regret that it could not be stereotyped to make its progress round the world. And yet, as it appeared that the lady had thrown the glove at him, and even lent him her miniature, it would be difficult to discover any ground for her wrath or his compunction. Both were evidently equally imaginary.

The Beau always regarded the city as a terra incognita. A merchant once asked him to dine there. Brummell gave him a look of intense enquiry. The merchant pressed him. “Well,” said the Beau, (who probably had excellent reasons for non-resistance to the man of money;) “well, if it must be—but you must first promise faithfully never to say a word on the subject.”

A visitor, full of the importance of a tour in the north of England, asked him which of the lakes he preferred. “I can’t possibly remember,” was the reply; “they are a great way from St James’s Street, and I don’t think they are spoken of in the clubs.” The visitor urged the question. “Robinson,” said the Beau, turning in obvious distress to his valet, “Robinson, pray tell this gentleman which of the lakes I preferred.”—“Windermere, sir, I think it was,” said the valet. “Well,” added Brummell, “probably you are in the right, Robinson. It may have been. Pray, sir, will Windermere do?”

“I wonder, Brummell, you take the trouble of driving to the barracks of the 10th with four horses. It certainly looks rather superb,” said one of the officers. “Why, I dare say it does; but that is not the point. What could I do, when my French valet, the best dresser of hair in the universe, gave me warning that he must leave me to myself, unless I gave up the vulgarity of posting with two?”

We come, in the course of this goodly history, to the second great event of the Beau’s life—the first being his introduction to Carlton House. The second was his being turned out of it. Brummell always denied, and with some indignation, the story of “Wales, ring the bell!”—a version which he justly declared to be “positively vulgar,” and therefore, with due respect for his own sense of elegance, absolutely impossible for him. He gave the more rational explanation, that he had taken the part of lady who was presumed to be the rival of Mrs Fitzherbert, and had been rash enough even to make some remarks on Mrs Fitzherbert’s en bon point, a matter of course never to be forgiven by a belle. This extended to a “declining love” between him and the Prince, whose foible was a horror of growing corpulent, and whom Brummell therefore denominated “Big Ben,” the nickname of a gigantic porter at Carlton House; adding the sting of calling Mrs Fitzherbert Benina. Moore, in one of his satires on the Prince’s letter of February the 13th, 1812, to the Duke of York, in which he cut the Whigs, thus parodies that celebrated “sentence of banishment:”—