Mr. Heneage was of the rising order of dull dandies: he had just sufficient volition to choose his calling, and sufficient energy to iron the cravat that indicated it: he spoke little, because he had nothing to say, and would have spoken less, had it been possible in the necessary intercourse of life to use fewer words; for he believed, that to be truly fine, one should not speak at all. His dandy aphorism was, that every lady should be her own link-boy; and his dandy system was to suffer her to be so. In Dublin he looked down upon the dawning dandyism of the aspiring natives; and in Dublin, as in London, he looked up to Lord Frederick Eversham, as the arbiter elegantiarum of that system, of which his own particular sect was but a subaltern branch, suited to inferior spirits, and accommodated to their subordinate capacities.
Lord Frederick, though a young man, was a dowager dandy, and among the original founders of that now degenerate and declining order. Great tact, savoir vivre and humour had distinguished his early probation; when to be a dandy it was requisite to be something more than a coxcomb. Two years residence at Paris (where, as a prisoner of war on patrole, he had been the delices of every fashionable circle) had confirmed him a merveilleux; and he now so pleasantly mingled the fopperies of his home vocation and foreign calling, that it was difficult to say, whether ST. JAMES’S STREET, or the CHAUSSà‰E D’ANTIN, had the fairest claim to his peculiarities: he had fought against France with a spirit and desperation that would have raised trophies to his fame, had he been a military chief, instead of a subaltern; but he loved her gaiety, her graces, and her language, with a passion that bordered upon prejudice. He had just returned from his delightful imprisonment, exclaiming with Petrarch, “I am free , but I am wretched;” and was too much embued with the spirit and grace of French foppery, not to contrast it with the dulness, silence, reserve, and cox-comical pedantry of the new sect of dandies, that had sprung up in his absence: for the rest, Lord Frederick was one
“Whom folly pleases, and whose follies please,”
who almost dignified vanity, and rendered affectation supportable by the good sense and good feeling, which, in spite of his efforts to conceal both, formed the basis of his character. In gallantry, “aimer en courant” was his device; and it was literally en courant from Dover to Dublin, (where his new appointment awaited him,) that he dropped into the opera, saw Lady Emily Vivian in Lady Dunore’s box, found or fancied in her what he called “the delicious laissez aller ease of a charming French woman;” and after a few days devoted aux petit soins, left London in love and in despair: in Dublin he viewed every thing in a distorted point of view, and wrote that pleasant and ludicrous letter to Lady Emily, complaining of his exile to the CELESTIAL EMPIRE, and describing the ceremonies of the yellow skreen, and castle Ko-tou, which had finally effected the existing arrangements at the castle of Dunore.
Quoted from: Lady Morgan: Florence Macarthy. An Irish Tale. Vol. II. London: Henry Colburn, 1819.