The picture placed the busts between, Gives Satire all her strength; But Folly at full length. Beau Nash was buried in the Abbey Church at Bath, on the 3rd February, 1761, having lived to the great age of eighty-eight his funeral obsequies were conducted with much parade and solemnity, and at the expense of the corporation. There were, no doubt, during this period, many other eminent fops besides these; but it is observable, that, a man was never distinguished by the title of Beau, if he had anything in him superior to it; that is, assuming that the epithet means a fop, which, in the words of Roscommon, is, "a man of small understanding and much ostentation." Still, and inconsistent as it may appear, very superior and clever men have bestowed far more than necessary attention upon their dress. Petrarch, in writing to his brother, says, "Recollect the time when we wore white habits, on which the least spot, or a plait ill-placed, would have been a subject of grief, and when our shoes were so tight, that we suffered martyrdom." Lord Byron avows that he had "a touch of dandyism in his minority," and "had retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones, at four-and-twenty." The Abbé Delille, who, besides being a priest, was also a poet, and, perhaps, the ugliest man of his day, lost so little of his personal vanity, that even in mature age, he invariably had his hair dressed with powder couleur de rose; and Prince Kaunitz, who wore satin stays, passed a portion of every morning in walking up and down a room in which four valets puffed a cloud of scented powder, but each of a different colour, in order that it might fall and amalgamate into the exact nuance that best suited their master's taste. "Ils étaient," observes a French writer, "des dévots à l'élégance, et en cela ils méritent nos respects; mais étaient-ils élégants? Voilà la question." Upon Rafaelle, the most spiritual of painters, has the epithet, "coxcomb," been irreverently bestowed. Nelson, who wrote the Companion to the Fasts and Festivals, and who is supposed to have been the author of The Whole Duty of Man, was a splendid dresser: it was from him that Richardson drew his character of Sir Charles Grandison. Charles Fox also, who, late in life, was one of the most unostentatious, not to say slovenly, men about town, was a macaroni in his youth, and, with his friends Lords Carlisle and Essex, wore red-heeled shoes! At this period the coxcombality of dress was necessarily great, for muffs, velvets, ruffles, gold lace, and perfumed powder, were then the usual appendages of male attire. We might, and with reason, imagine it was a woman, and not the Earl of March, a great sporting character, who, writing to George Selwyn, at Paris, in 1766, says, "The muff you sent me, by the Duke of Richmond, I liked prodigiously, vastly better than if it had been tigré, or of any glaring colourseveral are now making after it :" and again, in 1776, he remarks, "pray bring me two or three bottles of perfume to put amongst powder, and some patterns for velvets that are new and pretty." But perhaps the most remarkable instance that can be cited in proof of the fact that a feeling of dandyism sometimes forms a component part of a great mind, is that of the late Marquis Wellesley; to whom, almost to the last moment of his life, and when still in the full possession of those vigorous and intellectual faculties, the evidence of which forms one of the most brilliant. historical pictures in the public annals of this and the latter part of the last century,—a piece of rich waistcoating was as much an object of attraction and delight as to his handsome and youthful secretary. Indeed it is said that this nobleman frequently sat alone en grande toilette, decorated with his blue ribbon and the garter, as if intending to appear at a royal levee, or a chapter of the order. But to return to the period at which the macaronies flourished (who, according to the testimony of Horace Walpole, were travelled young men who wore long curls and spying-glasses), the adoption of broad cloth made sad havoc with the tastes of such men as the Duke of Queensberry; and the beaux who came in when muffs and velvets went out, were of a very different description. One of the most notorious was the late Lord Harewood, called, from the singular penchant he had for imitating the Prince of Wales in his dress, Prince Lascelles. Of this mania he was cured by Fox, Sheridan, and Wyndham, who persuaded His Royal Highness to allow his queue (which it was then the fashion to wear) to be concealed by the collar of his coat. He readily consented, and during dinner, for they were all dining with the Prince, one of the three called Lascelles's attention to the fact, who, completely tricked into the idea that the queue was cut off, appeared the next day, to the amusement of the conspirators, without his own. Colonel Montgomery, also a friend of the Prince of Wales's, and the unsuccessful principal in the duel with Captain Macnamara, was in the habit of dressing like the Duke of Hamilton, and thus received the sobriquet of the Duke of Hamilton's double. Another fop of this century was a Colonel Matthews, who being extremely distressed at the loss of one of his front teeth, determined upon having it replaced by one drawn from another person's jaw, trusting perhaps to that jargon of the doctors called "healing by second intention." He was fitted accordingly, but, horrible to relate, the saliva, or something adhering to the tooth, inoculating the system, brought on a cancer in the mouth, of which he died. Though many others might be enumerated besides. those I have mentioned, I will close the list with the name of the venerable patriarch of the Beaux, Sir Lumley Skeffington, who was still alive when these volumes first appeared, and was some connection of the Massareene family. He is said to have been entitled to the enviable denomination of the most amiable of the genus beau; and a distinguished author, who allowed his pen to dwell briefly on these matters some years ago, says, "that under all his double-breasted |