The day was the 13th of December, 1814. What was mortal of him was magnificently entombed, and the terms of his epitaph were more poetical than veracious. But, beneath it all,-brass, marble, and mendacity, the dandy of two centuries was left to sleep as undisturbedly as the curses of unpaid tailors would allow him to do. On the day of the Prince's decease a very fine gentleman indeed was sunning himself on the Steyne at Brighton. He was the cynosure of all observers, and his magnificent shadow glides this way. Do not mistake him for Romeo Coates. It is the famous Mr. Brummell. Chapeau bas at that illustrious name! BEAU BRUMMELL. "I scorn to crowd among the muddy throng DECKER'S Fortunatus. THE Distinction of Nash was his impertinence; the characteristic of Orlando the Fair, his affectation. To make a third, Jove joined the other two; and George Bryan Brummell was, as the elder Mr. Weller says, "the consikence of the manoeuvre." Had he only possessed intellect rightly directed, and even an infinitesimal degree of principle, he might have achieved a better reputation. The Greek sage who declared that man needed but three things whereby to prosper,-first, impudence; second, impudence; third, impudence, rather overrated his avadeia. It is true that a modest man runs great risk of being overwhelmed in his moral "passage of the Beresina," but he usually has principle to float him; whereas the knave who swims or struggles near him, be he never so impudent, ultimately exhibits an alacrity in sinking. It is in the immortal fitness of things that it should be so ordained. I think Brummell must have been a descendant of the little tailor who is said by another tailor, Stow, to have whined himself to death for the love of Queen Elizabeth. I mean him of whom Lord Charles Cavendish wrote: "I would not willingly Be pointed at in every company, As was the little tailor that to death Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth." Brummell, like the audacious schneider, had a soul that was at once given to the "confectioning of custume," and consorting with the great. Brummell, like many a steward's son, was partly the victim of his father's ambition. His sire was smitten with more desire to see him a gentleman than an honest man. The lad was brought up with as much reference to his future condition of gentility, as Miss Killmansegge was with respect to her present and future pros pects of Pactolian hue. Brummell was not a baby to suck a coral of less aristocratic value than that old mouthpiece of the unfortunate Monmouth which for years has given solace to the gums of the babies of Buccleuch. He was a lad who had an aversion for steel forks long before silver implements were familiar furniture at the tables of the middle classes, of which his father was a member; and scarcely was he a youth ex ephebis, and felt himself free from home restraints in gentle Henry's shades at Eton, when he not only modernized the white cravat or stock wich marks the Eton boy, but he put a gold buckle to it; and all the school "confessed the present god." The condiscipuli of that time and place have as much realized Hood's as Gray's 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.' The most rollicking tumbled into discretion, and became bishops; the most gentle were drafted into the army, and became blackguards. Some took to the stage, and some took portraits. A few achieved greatness; the majority have died away and are forgotten. "Blithe Carew was hung," and Brummell "went up like a rocket and came down like a stick." Brummell was like Goldsmith. Do not smile: I do not mean that he had the great writer's simplicity, industry, or goodness of heart. He was, nevertheless, like him in one respect. Poor Oliver, at Trinity College, Dublin, went in for honours, and failed. So Brummell, who, in 1793, was an undergraduate at Oxford, was a competitor for the Newdegate Prize, and lost it. From that hour. he abhorred books and bookish men. He had condescended to exert himself so far as to faintly run for the laurel. When he saw it awarded to a better man, he declared that he would never run again, but walk over the course of the world and win his prizes without effort. He had already indicated the paths by which he meant to gain the honours dimly alluded to. His example at college had already abolished cotton stockings, and made dingy cravats vulgar. Even D.D.'s looked at the audacious innovator, and ceased to be, what the initials designated, "deucedly dirty." The unsuccessful student was soon in possession of what he considered far better than "book learning," a third of £65,000. It was no great inheritance for a cornet in the 10th Hussars. That illustrious regiment had not yet achieved that renown of folly and of shame for which Croly pilloried it nightly, to the delight of assembled thousands, in his Pride shall have a Fall.' It was however the aspiration and the terror of all young heroes who longed to be enrolled in the sacred cohort, and who dreaded the fabulous cost of the luxury. The officers, like their ancestors at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, wore their estates upon their backs,—some of them before they had inherited the paternal acres. If the gorgeous costume and its never-ending variations did not effect this consummation, the expenses of the mess, where the mild warriors banqueted like barbaric sovereigns, and the cost of the delicate amusements of those perfumed knights, rarely failed to accomplish it. At the head of all, glittering example of the "gentleman," careful of carriage, courteous of speech, not ungenerous by impulse, but icy-cold of heart, was the Prince-Colonel, George, afterwards Fourth of the name. The Prince's chief intimate was Lord James Murray, subsequently Lord Glenlyon: at whose house at Datchet, old Queen Charlotte "did never counsel take, but sometimes tea." The new cornet superseded the old friend. The latter was a mild, gentleman-like man, popular with everybody but his credi tors, quorum pars fui; and I may add, that he is pleasantly and gratefully remembered by one at least of them. Brummell however took the Regent by storm. There was no resisting him. The Prince was fascinated. Brummell might be absent from parade, neglect duties even more important, and laugh at all suggestion and reproach,-" our general's friend was now the general." He did precisely what he pleased, nothing that he ought; and in three years he was full captain, to the as full disgust of older officers, who enviously admired while they deeply cursed him. Never probably was the Beau in such full-blown glory as at this period of his gold-lace, best jokes and increasing sway. He was in the very height of his ecstatic enjoyment, luxuriating in the gentility of a "gentil Hussard," and mastering his profession, not exactly after the fashion of Marlborough;-he was in the very paradisiacal state of aristocratic soldiership, when the regiment was ordered to Manchester. Brummell nearly fainted at the idea of such vulgarity, and he left the regiment in infinite disgust. The step gained for him an immense increase of reputation -among fools! The world had not been to him hitherto as to our old friend, Pistol, an oyster, which he with sword could open. He may be said to have failed, both by book and blade. He was now to really soar by other means. Now came the period when he evinced his disgust of vegetables by confessing that he had once caten- -a pea. Then was the funny time when his slavish hearers laughed at the joke wherein he wrapped an excuse for being hoarse, on the ground that he had slept in a house with a damp stranger. It was not half so excellent a joke as that enunciated, unwittingly, by the poor old Irishwoman suffering from catarrh, and who accounted for the same by stating that she "slept last night in a field and forgot to shut the gate." However, it was good enough for a man who really fancied that he manifested humour when he expressed unconsciousness of there being such |