e task of
essaying unaided a toilet so extensive and so intricate? You wondered
even when you heard that he was wont at Oxford to make without help his
toilet of every day. Well, the true dandy is always capable of such high
independence. He is craftsman as well as artist. And, though any unaided
Knight but he with whom we are here concerned would belike have doddered
hopeless in that labyrinth of hooks and buckles which underlies the
visible glory of a Knight "arraied full and proper," Dorset threaded his
way featly and without pause. He had mastered his first excitement. In
his swiftness was no haste. His procedure had the ease and inevitability
of a natural phenomenon, and was most like to the coming of a rainbow.

Crimson-doubleted, blue-ribanded, white-trunk-hosed, he stooped to
understrap his left knee with that strap of velvet round which
sparkles the proud gay motto of the Order. He affixed to his breast the
octoradiant star, so much larger and more lustrous than any actual star
in heaven. Round his neck he slung that long daedal chain wherefrom St.
George, slaying the Dragon, dangles. He bowed his shoulders to assume
that vast mantle of blue velvet, so voluminous, so enveloping, that,
despite the Cross of St. George blazing on it, and the shoulder-knots
like two great white tropical flowers planted on it, we seem to know
from it in what manner of mantle Elijah prophesied. Across his breast
he knotted this mantle's two cords of gleaming bullion, one tassel a
due trifle higher than its fellow. All these things being done, he moved
away from the mirror, and drew on a pair of white kid gloves. Both of
these being buttoned, he plucked up certain folds of his mantle into the
hollow of his left arm, and with his right hand gave to his left hand
that ostrich-plumed and heron-plumed hat of black velvet in which a
Knight of the Garter is entitled to take his walks abroad. Then, with
head erect, and measured tread, he returned to the mirror.

You are thinking, I know, of Mr. Sargent's famous portrait of him.
Forget it. Tankerton Hall is open to the public on Wednesdays. Go
there, and in the dining-hall stand to study well Sir Thomas Lawrence's
portrait of the eleventh Duke. Imagine a man some twenty years younger
than he whom you there behold, but having some such features and some
such bearing, and clad in just such robes. Sublimate the dignity of
that bearing and of those features, and you will then have seen the
fourt