used perfumes, and attributed
a characteristic importance to their use. Meeting a gentleman at a ball
with whom he conversed for a while, some of the party enquired the
stranger's name. "Can't possibly tell," was the Beau's answer. "But he
is evidently a gentleman--his perfumes are good." He objected to country
gentlemen being introduced into Watier's, on the ground "that their
boots always smelt of horse-dung and bad blacking."

His taste in matters of _virtu_ was one of the sources of his profusion;
but it always had a reference to himself. He evidently preferred a
snuff-box which he could display in his hand, to a Raphael which he
could exhibit only on his wall. His snuff-boxes were numerous and
costly. But even in taking snuff he had his style: he always opened the
box with _one_ hand, the left. The Prince imitated him in this _tour de
grace_.

A fashion always becomes more fashionable as it becomes more ridiculous.
People cling to it as they pet a monkey, for its deformity. The high
head-dresses of France, which must have been a burden, made the tour of
Europe, and endured through a century. The high heels, which almost
wholly precluded safe walking, lasted their century. The use of powder
was universal until it was driven out of France by republicanism, and
out of England by famine. The flour used by the British army alone for
whitening their heads was calculated to amount to the annual provision
for 50,000 people. Snuff had been universally in use from the middle of
the seventeenth century; and the sums spent on this filthy and foolish
indulgence, the time wasted on it, and the injury done to health, if
they could all have been thrown into the common form of money, would
have paid the national debt of England. The common people have their
full share in this general absurdity. The gin drunk in England and Wales
annually amounts to nearly twenty millions of pounds sterling; a sum
which would pay all the poor rates three times over, and, turned to any
public purpose, might cover the land with great institutions--the
principal result of this enormous expenditure now being to fill the
population with vice, misery, and madness.

In the matter of coats Brummell had but one rival, the Prince, whose
rank of course gave him a general advantage, yet whose taste was clearly
held as inferior by the royal _artistes_ themselves. A baronet, who went
to Schweitzer's to get himself equipped in the first style, asked him
what c