There goes one of our silly dandies, said my friend to me the other day, as we were walking leisurely up —- street. Silly the person may be, I replied, but he cannot be a dandy and lack brains; the thing is impossible. You may tell me of vain fops and fashionably dressed fools, but, though he often hold communion with such, your genuine dandy is a being of a different stamp. Destitute of all positive excellence he may indeed be, but then he must personate the beau ideal of all that is negatively attractive. Both his dress and address are to be admired in the tout ensemble, but not remarked or commented on in detail: they must, without exhibiting singularity, defy imitation and analysis, and be the despair of country boobies, and the envy of city bloods who are yet in their chrysalis state. Self possessed, and yet free from downright effrontery, a dandy may feel mortification, but on no account is he to show it. He must with equal fortitude, give the cut direct to his prince, and receive his congé from the lips of his adored fair one. We have all heard of beau Brummel, who, forbidden the society of the then Prince of Wales for some rather too daring freak, affected the next day in the park, not to know him, and asked a person within hearing of his royal highness, who was that fat friend of his. Poor Brummel, when shall we look upon his like again; , he who could give ton for a season to a cross, forward, red-haired right honourable, by praising him for having his pocket handkerchief agreeably scented.

Knowledge is too heavy a commodity for your true exquisite, who shuns loaded brains as he would a protuberant coat pocket. But he is not on this account taken unawares by questions, or scientific remarks of a member of any philosophical society. His look, accompanied by some interjectional polysyllable of high sound, will be as much as to say: , Sir, I could have learned all that, or I have forgotten it , I despise it as constraining, awkward, and unfashionable, and pity you for taking up with such bad company. Poetry is, however, the true touchstone of dandyism , it soon betrays a counterfeit, for if he be caught reciting an entire passage without any variation of tone or expression, he shows off as a dead flat; and if with feeling, he is straitway stigmatised as a sentimentalist; in either case, his pretensions to triumphant fashion are lost at least for one whole season. A word, an epithetical phrase, or at most a single line, usually in a sense different from that intended by the poet himself, is the true style of quotation of your leader of haut ton. Nor is the language unimportant , his own vernacular is vulgar , French, once the vogue, is becoming too common. Italian is the mode , the bei pregi della natura accréscere sounds classical, and who are more strictly so than the gentlemen of the dandy school , in their particular way and fashion.

Love of effect in the display of the outward man, and a keen sense of the ludicrous in attire and carriage, are distinguishing traits of dandy character, which, whether in camp or lady’s bower, are never lost. Hence, while we despise the boyish vanity of Pompey’s soldiers at the battle of Pharsalia, in being afraid of having their pretty faces scarred, we are bound to admire the force of the darling passion in one of the English ‘gentlemen of the guards,’ as the king’s household troops were called in Spain. After a long and fatiguing march over a most villainously bad road, he exclaimed, in looking at his muddy boots and bespattered uniform: , “What would Morton think, were he to see me in Bond street in such a plight?” The most serious complaint made by the gentlemen of the guards, when they were taken by surprise in the morning’s sortie of the French garrison from Bayonne, was that they could not dress themselves in proper style; but were obliged to fight or be cut down, in a most unfashionable, not to say unmilitary kind of dress , and this too before Frenchmen , the thing was too bad. They were gallant fellows after all, those dandies, although at first a little restive under the strict discipline of his grace of Wellington , chiefly because he commanded their abandoning some of their West End decorations for suitable peninsular adjustments. We have heard, not indeed from Sir Walter Scott or Mr. Southey, that nothing transpired during the whole war which so much endangered the popularity of the great captain at home, as this reform among the dandy officers.

Quoted from: The Philadelphia Monthly Magazine devoted to General Literature and the Fine Arts. March 1828. Vol. 1.