We beg our readers to pay attention to this word. It is a most erroneous custom to call one an exquisite or a dandy indiscriminately, for an essential difference exists between the two. Whatever dandies might have been in former days, it is not less certain that they compose a class inferior in the fashionable scale to that of the exquisites. Indeed the differences may be thus defined, the exquisites are the aristocracy of fashion, and the dandies the commoners. The tribe of dandies, however, being very numerous, one ought to be cautious in assigning the same degree of merit to all.

Indeed, a great proportion of them are quacks and impostors, who have no right to push themselves into the regions of fashion save their own brazen impudence, and adaptness in the art of intrusion. A dandy is more exaggerated in his dress than an exquisite. For as birth and rank confer a certain natural distingué air to the possessor of those advantages, which no art, no effort, can bestow; in the same manner the exquisite carries his toilet about him with a certain elegant nonchalance , whereas the dandy evidently shews that he makes it the important business of his life. Exquisites mix with the better class of dandies, but more in the spirit of acquaintanceship than intimacy. The best dandies, who are also admissibles, or tolerated, belong to the families of private ‘squires of good birth, but slender fortune, the most eminent of professional gentlemen, the sons of rich parvenus and untitled foreigners, who are not musicians or swindlers; the second class consists of young attorneys, stock-jobbers, and professors; and the third and last, of the tag-rag- and-bobtail, such as fashionable tradesmen, and miscellanies of all sorts. It is owing to this that you may see two dandies passing through Bond-street one after the other, and the first obtains a token of recognition from a carriage bearing a coronet, whereas the second, as he passes, may elicit the smiles of derision of other lounging dandies. The solution of this mystery is, that the first was a real dandy, and the second an intrusive, a nobody. We again caution the reader not to confound the dandies, who are, among themselvesy as different as two beings can possibly be.

Quoted from: Joaquà­n Telesforo de Trueba y Cosà­o: Paris and London. A Novel. Vol. II. London: Colburn, 1831.