Apart, however, from the desire of astonishing my rivals in love and coxcombry, I was overjoyed at the prospect of entering that renowned circle,, the school of my art,, the cradle of infant dandyism,, the incipient Order that was to supersede the bucks, ruffians, and bang-up gentlemen of the road, so long in possession of the pavé.

“Away with such triflers!” cries the sage, flinging aside our pages into the depths of his gloomy library, as if the grubbers among the dry bones of history did more to expedite the progress of the times, than those fluttering butterflies who oppose, at least, no dead weight to the general impetus. The truth is that, like a straw thrown up to determine the course of the wind, the triflers of any epoch are an invaluable evidence of the bent of the public mind. They are always floating on the surface,, always ostensible !, They are a mark for general observation. Statesmen and beaux are the only really public men. Posterity will see, in Brummell and Castlereagh, the leading characters of the Regency,, of the gilded, not the golden age !

The creation of Dandyism, (pshaw not, ye critics! nor exclaim ” hold, enough !”, for the thing is obsolete, ” et il n’y a rien de nouveau que ce qui est oublié.‘”); the creation, I say of Dandyism afforded the first indication to the public, that, in spite of Stultz and Truefitt, he portraits of Sir Thomas and the certificates of Sir Henry,, the Prince was growing old !, Had we written the word then, it must have been thus, –, or, at worst, o, d ; for no one presumed to approach more definitely that fatal hint. If, when Louis the Fourteenth attained his seventieth year, his courtiers defined soixante et dix ans as l’age de tout le monde, no one at Carlton House now presumed to be less than five-and-forty.

Nature, however, was no courtier. Nature began to hint that liqueurs were a less safe beverage than sherry,, that jollity was a plebeian effervescence,, wit a more princely thing than humor,, superciliousness than noise., And, lo ! dandyism ” rose like an exhalation,”, stole in on tiptoe ;, and the vulgar began to record the prowesses of George Brummell, as they now enlarge upon the feats of Mehemet Ali.

It is all stupid and silly enough in the retrospection ; and Brummell is, at present, only known to history as an adventurer who, having given the law to princes, eventually received it from a Juge de paix, and died a lunatic in a public hospital; just as, fifteen years ago, Napoleon was an adventurer who, having given the law to emperors, eventually received it from Sir Hudson Lowe, and died of the worries at St. Helena !

But the re-action has commenced. Napoleon is beginning to receive ample justice at the hands of a new generation ; and our grand-nephews will behold in George Brummell a great reformer,, a man who dared to be cleanly in the dirtiest of times,, a man who compelled gentlemen to quit the coach-box and assume a place in their own carriage,, a man who induced the ingenuous youth of Britain to prove their valor otherwise than by threshing superannuated watchmen,, a man, in short, who will survive for posterity as Charlemagne of the great empire of Clubs.

It would never surprise me to find the ashes of the great ex-dandy fetched home from Caen, as those of Napoleon have been from St. Helena, to be interred at the foot of the Duke of York’s column ; on the identical spot where he initiated the Prince into the mysteries of Roman punch ; the Sully of that modern Henri whose good-nature probably wished that all his subjects might have ” un turbot au pot.” No doubt that, like the great man of antiquity, George Brummell often threatened his ungrateful country that it ” should not even possess his bones !” But flesh and blood are more susceptible in their generation, than the disembodied and enlightened ghost.

So Seneca, ” Corruptible corpus aggravat animam ; et deprimitterrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem !”

I digress, that is to say, I do not digress, but I grow garrulous ; and nobody, now-a-days, is allowed to be garrulous in print, save ” The Doctor,” and the Poor Law Commissioners. If Rabelais had written with the fear of the weekly and monthly reviews before his eyes, he would have grown as stiff and concise as a drill sergeant.

One word more, however, about the Brummell school! If effeminate, conceited, frivolous, in their pursuit of pleasure, they pursued it, at least, with less peril to his Majesty’s lieges than the rufflers of more recent times. Melton, which owed its origin to their sportmanship, still attests that they were good riders and good fellows, though they smashed neither turnpike-gates nor policemen. They drank their claret, without forcing buckets of gin down the throats of the swell-mob; and like certain insect tribes which prey upon each other, their victims were sought and found in their own order of society. It is not always that the scum floating on the surface of every great capital, is of so innoxious a nature. Theirs was the foam of champagne, not the frothing of coculus indicus.

From: Mrs. Gore: Cecil: or, The adventures of a coxcomb: a novel, Vol. 1.