The Gorgeous Macaroni The Life Cl Beau Brummell. By Captain

Jesse. New Edition, with 20 coloured plates. (The Navarre Society. 24s.)

Tun son tif a person who has been variously described as treasury porter, confectioner, and private secretary, and grandson of a gentleman's gentleman, George Bryan Brummell did not seem, at his birth, to hold forth any particular promise of one day becoming a Dictator, a Buonaparte of fashion.

He was as obscure, in his early youth, as was Le Petit Caporal : and he died, more tragically, in a pauper lunatic asylum in a foreign country—according to the nuns who attended him, the most docile patient ever admitted to the sanctuary of Le Bon Sauveur, but mad. Nobody had heard of him before that day on which he first appeared, like a new comet trailing a wake of asteroids and scented airs, in the glittering firmament of the Prince Regent's court : and few remembered him when he had gone, a discountenanced beau (that pathetic figure) overwhelmed with debts, and already beginning to wilt like a

late-summer poppy, to his voluntary exile in a dingy Conti- nental town. In Caen, it is true, he obtained a consulship,

indulged in some very pretty affairs of the heart, and was still,

in his blue coat, velvet collar, and unexceptionable tie, the Beau Undaunted, but unfortunately the consulship was soon after-

wards abolished and poor Brummell, again unable to pay his debts, was ignominiously taken from his bed one May morning and thrown into prison. Several months later he was released, but his day was over. Who in England cared about his misfortunes now ? Some of his late satellites had no doubt picked up his choicest oddments of furniture—a mahogany- framed cheval dressing-glass,:fen Dozen of Capital Old Port, &c.—but that was all. There were always plenty of Beaux ready to step into his red-heeled shoes, and royal favourites who had quarrelled with their masters must expect such twists of fate.

Yet posterity, looking backward, was not to be blinded to perspective by the lace frills, the peccadilloes and mimic

fripperies of successive luminaries, and those few Who remem-

bered Brummell the Magnificent had only to wait awhile, marshal their reminiscences, collect their anecdotes, and behold !—their idol was secure for immortality. "The

vigorous and comprehensive mind, that had the courage morale to wear a sky-blue coat, and the tightest of pantaloons, going,

going, gone !—without leaving one essay on the philosophy of dress, or one brochure on whiskers. Alas for the renown of such men ! " Thus writes the admirable Jesse—in parenthesis,

was there ever such a biographer as this ? Even Boswell must give place to him in literary éclat—but such words are mere. rhetoric, and the wind is squashed out of them by their writer's own handiwork, his monumental book.

From all that astounding parade of elegants, coxcombs, lordly beauties and dandies that gathered nightly round the gaming tables of Carlton House, drinking to their own several dooms in "aromatic and luscious alcohol," Beau Brummell had stood out as something almost sublime by comparison, and nothing like him was ever seen again. He was the king of all the macaronies, and it is largely due to him that so many details of their finicking but fascinating world survive to-day : Beau Nash, the exquisite" King of Bath," with his satins and pencilled eyebrows, Beau Hewitt the genius who invented " damme," Beau Fielding with his beautiful profile and host of lackeys all in yellow liveries and black-feathered hats, Beau Edgeworth the "Prince of Puppies" who, according to Steele, "tied a very pretty ribbon, with a cross of jewels, to his breast," or the Earl of March, with his muff ("which I like, pro- cl4iously, vastly better than if it had been tigre ")—these court stars were all very well in their particular orbits. They were the mirrors of fashion, the male belles, the Ornaments. But they were not Beaux Drammen. They were the Sir Fopling Flutters of the court (not the Earl of March, however) each one of whom, in Hotspur's phrase, "shone so bright and smelt so Sweet and talked so like a waiting gentlewoman

troop of charmers : but our beau, if no profound thinker, was a satirist who could use his tongue like a stiletto, and, indeed, he won his envied, if not justly enviable notoriety, largely by. ridiculing others, by his drolleries of speech—in fact, by his talk even more than by his elegance,

Not many will agree with Lord Byron's estimate of Brummen as one of the three greatest figures of the nineteenth century —Napoleon and Byron himself, being the other two—but to depict the Beau merely as a strutting peacock, as is fre- quently done, is just as grossly to distort the truth. The gorgeous macaroni had little in common with the tailors' dummies and lounge lizards of our day : and besides being a wit, a talented designer, and, in his light way, a scholar, he may even have been something of a poet.

It is true that the most delightful of the verses self. attributed to him, "a trifling but meritorious poetical frag- ment," entitled, The Butterfly's Funeral, in which we find moles, hornets, and grasshoppers engaged in the burial obsequies, was written merely because the penning of light verses happened to be one of the Court rages at the time : and it is also true that the verses may not have been Brummell's at all. But this does not detract from their merit, and as the admirable Jesse has written, "if he only applied them to circumstances to which they refer, he showed some feeling, and very good taste." He did, and when he set his hand to something really individual, the six-leaved allegorical screen intended for the Duchess of York, the result, as we are told, was in its way a masterpiece : some idea of its eccentric charm may be had from the following description of its fifth compartment :— "The. bear in the fifth compartment is stimulating his appetite with a young crocodile : around him are children at play, shepherds, the Graces, Venus, and numerous insects and shells. Lower down are portraits, of Charles Fox, Necker, Sheridan, the Regent Philip of Orleans, and John Kemble. Fox has a butterfly near him ; Nelson, Greenwich Hospital ; Sheridan, a Cupid carousing. on some straw ; and Kemble, a ladybird on his waistcoat. Round the arm of a man in Hessians is a green monkey holding a mask, and another monkey is between his legs. There are also likenesses of Lucien Buonaparte, the Princess Charlotte, and the Duke of Cambridge when a young man ; and a little piece representing an old cure de village trying, but in vain, to thread the needle of one of his pretty parishioners." Unfortunately, Brim-men left no explanation of his screen in writing, and much of the design, when the gossip of the day had been forgotten, was thus left meaningless, without a key.

Of the great Beau's conversational brilliance, and the thousand and one amusing incidents of his wholly amazing life, at Eton, Oxford, the Court, and in France, as recorded here by Captain Jesse, it is impossible to give any coherent account in a review. His love-affairs were numerous and mostly unsatisfactory, as was his marriage. Once he attempted an elopement, but with no success, "he and- the intended Mrs. Brummell being caught at the corner of the street, a servant having turned mother's evidence." On another occasion he explained his failure in a ".matrimonial speculation" by declaring that there was nothing else to do, since " I discovered that the Lady Mary, actually ate cabbage !" He was never at a loss for the retort exculpatory.

The two volumes of this edition of Beau Brununell's life' are finely produced:. and they make a superb biographical entertainment. For if the man was not a hew, he was, for a while, the gayest of all gay dogs—for immortality, the arcktype of all gay dogs—which from the reader'apoint of view, is something a good deal better. Nor was he unlovable. Be kept a parrot, and was extremely attached to it. Ile' had dog frileirds, he Was kind to mice, and during the most anxious, unhappy days in France, he undertook to teach his landlady's daughter English. He was deliglitfully, daringly impudent, as we know from the famous "Who's your fat friend ? " story, and to the end of his days he never cringed .be,fore any man, king or gendarme. The moralists may point denun- ciatory fingers at him, drivelling in his second childhood at Caen ; but Brummell, had he been able to answer tbern, would only have laughed. His luck had turned, that was all, and if they wanted a reason for that, why, here it was : He had given his lucky sixpence, his silver sixPenc. e with

hole in it, by mistake to a hackney coachman.

Unman MecLArry.n.