The Beau of 1734 “was like the cinnamon-tree; his bark is worth more than his body. A creature of the doubtful gender, masculine in habit, and feminine in manners; one who has so little manners, that he himself doth not regard it half so much as his body.

All his reading has been the academy of compliments; and his heels have profited as much by it as his head. The cut of his clothes he learnt at Paris, the tone of his voice in Italy, and his affectation every where. In his dressing he shews his industry; for he spends four hours a day constantly in it without being fatigued or out of patience. His genius appears in the variety of his suits, and his generosity in his taylor’s bills; his delicacy in not so much as bearing a breath of wind to blow on him, and his innocency in being seen with ladies at all hours, and never once suspected of doing an uncivil thing. When he is dressed, the business of the day is over; when he is undressed, he grows invisible, for his clothes are all that is seen of him; when he dies, they are his only valuable remains, and hung up as trophies in Monmouth-street.”

The customs and manners of a part of the community of 1735 are satirically detailed in a “Covent-garden Eclogue:”

“The midnight Justice, now devoid of care,
Began to slumber in his elbow-chair;
Long had he wak’d, but now his trade was o’er,
Nor could expect a single shilling more:
The watch had cry’d Past one, with hollow strain,
And to their stands return’d to sleep again;
Grave cits and bullies, rakes and squeamish beaux,
Came reeling with their doxies from the Rose;
Jephson’s and Mitchell’s hurry now was done,
And now Tom King’s (so rakes ordain’d) begun;
Bright shone the Moon, and calm around the sky,
No cinder-wench, nor straggling link-boy nigh,
When in that garden, where with mimic pow’r
Strut the mock-purple heroes of an hour;
Where by grave matrons cabbages are sold,
Who all the live-long day drink gin and scold;”
&c.

Quoted from: James Peller Malcolm: Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London During the Eighteenth Century. Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810.