‘Qui refute, muse !’ says a French adage. I do not remember ever refusing anything, except the Consulship of Sierra-Leone, and a proffered journey in my friend Archdeacon P.’s carriage, which was going down to Yorkshire at the tail of a broadwheeled waggon ;, and yet I am irrecoverably given to musing !, It is vain to struggle against the propensity. In the streets,, the churches,, in ‘both their houses,’ the Garden and the Lane, , I have no greater amusement than musing ;, and in the hope of rendering my meditations profitable to others as well as pleasing to myself, I intend, henceforward, to transfer my musings to paper,, and moralize, ‘pro bono Pimlico,’ on the nothingnesses of daily life.

All musers are, or ought to be, pedestrians. I cannot reflect without pain on the number of times I was personally led to muse upon the unique administration of Don Birnie della Bow street, by the circumstance of breaking my own or other people’s cabriolets,, my own or other people’s limbs,, while musing in my meditative youth in vehicular abstraction. It is the obvious duty of an honest man to muse, as it is the duty of an honourable gentleman to speak,, upon his legs ! High-ways and by-ways,, Charing Cross or the Edgeware Road,, form accordingly any school of philosophy ; and, while musing my way along Bond street yesterday afternoon, I was suddenly struck by the immense march of foppery effected by the enervation of the male generation during the last fifteen years. At the commencement of that period, not more than half-a-dozen ‘men’s mercers’ nourished in the metropolis. There was the general hosier, the general haberdasher, and the ready-made linen warehouse, in whose window hung a few hop-sacks, with bags appended for sleeves, purporting to be a decent outfit for ‘gentlemen of the army and navy,’ or exiles to either India. In their Jacobinical abjuration of powder and periwigs, ruffles and embroidery, the gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease, seemed determined to be as much as possible at their ease; , and, with the exception of the sporting-gentlemanliness of buckskins and topboots, not an outward and visible sign of dandyism was to be seen.

It seems but yesterday that a report of the Prince Regent’s having appeared in a black stock, suddenly created a stock in trade of those unseemly appurtenances, to constitute a new branch of commerce; and in the course of a year or two, the lounging regions of Bond street, Regent and St James’s streets, were adorned with a succession of fop-shops, devoted to the exhibition of Persian dressing-gowns, , velvet braces,, cachmere comfortables,, Bandana handkerchiefs of every dye and device,, and linen puffed, plaited, embroidered, and quilled, beyond the fancy of the choicest milliner in the land! From Nicholls, who effected the great rise in Stocks,, to Keene, better known in dandy-land as the King of Cachmere, there exist some hundred and fifty artists in the decorative line, to whom we are indebted for the extraordinary elaboration of costume which, at the present time, fairly balances the stigma of personal vanity between the two sexes. A species of flashiness is, in fact, creeping in upon us from the Chaussée d’Antin, of the most effeminate and contemptible description. Jewelled studs are now accompanied by waistcoat buttons of enamel and coloured stones; and the élégants du balcon de l’Opéra, who present an exaggerated edition of the prevailing fashion, are just now plaited, frilled, and flounced, covered with trinkets and chains, and bigarré with vests of cachmere or chaly, of fanciful patterns. A year hence, and the same tawdry vanities having obtained ground among ourselves, the peaked pumps just now de rigueur in Paris, will probably grace the boards of Almack’s. There are now as many vanity shops in town for the gentlemen as the ladies,, where the application of all such modern discoveries as varnish-blacking,, elastic caoutchouc,, and variegated velvet, is exclusively absorbed by the men.

I shall probably muse my way, next week, towards ‘The Acre,’, having a word or two to say anent Pelhams, and other anomalous inventions of these reforming times.

From: The Court Journal. Gazette of the fashionable world. 9. Februar 1833. No. 198.