Our Biographia Britannica is very meagre of names bearing prefatory titles of distinction, conferred, not by kings, but by common tacit consent: Fully sensible of this deficiency, we have been making out of late, for our own amusement, a list of worthies deriving the patents of their honours from the voice of the people. It is a scanty but curious catalogue, Venerable Bede, Old Parr, Beau Brummell, Bloody Mary, and Beau Nash’.’ Selden, in his ” Titles of Honour,” is silent on the subject of such popular peerages. No fees were paid upon their appropriation, so our learned antiquary overlooked a class of worthies whose names are never mentioned without their attributes of distinction, an honour seldom awarded to the proudest of our peers.

The fame of Venerable Bede survives most usefully in his own history ; Old Parr seems still to live among us in the admirable impersonation of Mr. Farren; Beau Brummell’s remains have been intrusted to the editorial care of Captain Jesse ; Bloody Mary has had of late a successful whitewash from the antiquarian fervour of Mr. Tytler ; and the Life of Beau Nash has been written at some length, and with admirable skill, by one whose charm of composition could throw an interest around the commonest topic he took in hand, telling a story with scarcely any other art than that of arranging the materials in their natural order.

I allude to the Life of Beau Nash by no less eminent a hand than that of Dr. Goldsmith. The Doctor was a dandy in dress, in a fashion and in a manner peculiarly his own. His tailor’s bills have been printed by Mr. Prior for the edification of the curious, and his dress and appearance preserved to the life in the entertaining biography of Boswell. Goldsmith should have written the life of Nash in the halfdress suit of ratteen he wore at Boswell’s party ; ” for the life of a beau,” as he tells us, ” if a beau could write, would certainly serve to regale curiosity.”

Dr. Cheyne of Bath, was heard to declare, in one of his humorous moods, that Beau Nash never had a father. The entry of Tom Hill’s baptismal register was destroyed, so Theodore Hook affirmed, in the Fire of London. Dr. Cheyne would say at times, that Beau Nash never had the ordinary distinction of a Christian name. The Duchess of Marlborough, one day rallying him in public company upon the obscurity of his birth, compared him to Gil Bias, who was ashamed of his father. ” No, madam,” replied the beau, ” I seldom mention my father in company ; not because I have any reason to be ashamed of him, but because he has some reason to be ashamed of me.”

Beau Brummell was the son of a confectioner, in Jermyn Street. His father never served up a daintier dish, a better kind of trifle, or a more delicate piece of pastry, than the full conception of his illustrious son. Beau Nash’s father was, says Goldsmith, a partner in a glass-house ;, no inappropriate birthplace for a beau. Mr. Martin’s hero may have been born, for what we know, with a pocket-mirror in his hand ; he made the world his glass-house, for wheresoever he went, his sole contemplation was himself.

If Romulus founded Rome, Beau Nash was the founder of Bath ; for before the Beau existed, Bath was but a poor place. He first erected it into a province of pleasure, and became, by universal consent, its legislator and ruler. Bath was his kingdom, and Tunbridge his colony. His name is inseparably allied with both places. You may as well think of walking over the field of Waterloo, and forgetting Wellington, as of going to Bath, and forgetting Beau Nash. His fame and name pervade the place ;, you quote Anstey, but you think and talk of Beau Nash. Such are the influences and effects of genius.
Mr. Martin has drawn our Lycurgus of a beau contemplating the graces of his person in a new mirror fresh from the glass-house of his father at Swansea, he has just concocted his noble code of laws for the regulation of the city-balls, and his thoughts are divided between the consequence of his person and the civilizing effects of his new edict. He has no idea of ” Folly at full length,” but bows and simpers while achieving an imaginary conquest, or sneers with a kind of proud satisfaction, as if foreseeing the way in which some rebel lady has been made amenable at last to the wise provisions of his law. ” D, n her,” he is saying to himself, ” Regulation 8 has done for her; what does it say ?, ‘ That the elder ladies and children be content with a second bench at the ball, as being past or not come to perfection :’ ‘fore Gad, I’ve settled her : , if she says much, I’ll have a gardener in with a ladder, his bag of shreds, his nails and hammer, and I’ll tack her up to the back benches as a confirmed old wall-flower.”

Our Beau was very rude at times, rude both in sentiment and language. The ladies, it is true, gave him a great deal of trouble, and it was long before he could bring them within his code of dancing discipline and ball-room order. As his power and influence increased, he became the little tyrant at Tunbridge, and the overbearing despot at Bath. He waged a long and successful war against gentlemen in boots and ladies in white aprons. ” I have known him on a ball night,” says Goldsmith, ” strip even the Duchess of Queensbury, and throw her apron at one of the hinder benches ; observing, that none but abigails appeared in white aprons.” The good-natured Duchess laughed and acquiesced in his censure, remembering perhaps the lines in Pope : ,

” If Queensbury to strip there’s no compelling,
‘Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.”

When the Princess Amelia applied to him for one dance more, he refused,, his laws, he said, were the laws of the Medes and Persians, laws which altered not.

It was an easy matter to tear an apron from the waist of a lady, but a difficult undertaking to extract a pair of boots from the unwilling feet of a country ‘squire. Nash is said to have made the attempt, and in a full assembly, covering his failure with an arch air, and a polite inquiry, Why Mr. So and So had not brought his horse in?, “The beast was shod and so was his master.”

But these insolent sayings were first said when Beau Nash had become the beau of three generations, when his rudeness had grown proverbial, and men laughed like the Duchess of Queensbury, and let the dandy have his own way. They could not but bow to the decision of one whose picture was taken at full-length within their ball-room, with Sir Isaac Newton and the poet Pope for the Beau’s supporters. They acquiesced, and let Lord Chesterfield tell why,

” Immortal Newton never spoke,
More truth than here you’ll find;
Nor Pope himself e’er penn’d a joke,
More cruel on mankind.

The pict ure placed the busts hetween,
Gives satire all her strength ;
Wisdom and Wit are little seen,
But Folly at full length.”

A statue of Beau Nash is appropriately placed in the Pump-Room at Bath, but he wants the busts. They should be replaced for the sake of the epigram.

From: The Illuminated magazine, Band 2 (1844)