O Young Men of this Age, be warned!

It is astonishing to what a number of insignificant things high art has
been applied, and with what success. It is the vice of high civilization
to look for it and reverence it, where a ruder age would only laugh at
its employment. Crime and cookery, especially, have been raised into
sciences of late, and the professors of both received the amount of
honour due to their acquirements. Who would be so naive as to sneer at
the author of 'The Art of Dining?' or who so ungentlemanly as not to
pity the sorrows of a pious baronet, whose devotion to the noble art of
appropriation was shamefully rewarded with accommodation gratis on board
one of Her Majesty's transport-ships? The disciples of Ude have left us
the literary results of their studies, and one at least, the graceful
Alexis Soyer, is numbered among our public benefactors. We have little
doubt that as the art, vulgarly called 'embezzlement,' becomes more and
more fashionable, as it does every day, we shall have a work on the 'Art
of Appropriation.' It is a pity that Brummell looked down upon
literature: poor literature! it had a hard struggle to recover the
slight, for we are convinced there is not a work more wanted than the
'Art of Dressing,' and 'George the Less' was almost the last professor
of that elaborate science.

If the maxim, that 'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well,'
hold good, Beau Brummell must be regarded in the light of a great man.
That dressing is worth doing at all, everybody but a Fiji Islander seems
to admit, for everybody does it. If, then, a man succeeds in dressing
better than anybody else, it follows that he is entitled to the most
universal admiration.

But there was another object to which this great man condescended to
apply the principles of high art--I mean affectation. How admirably he
succeeded in this his life will show. But can we doubt that he is
entitled to our greatest esteem and heartiest gratitude for the studies
he pursued with unremitting patience in these two useful branches, when
we find that a prince of the blood delighted to honour, and the richest,
noblest, and most distinguished men of half a century ago were proud to
know him? We are writing, then, of no common man, no mere beau, but of
the greatest professor of two of the most popular sciences--Dress and
Affectation. Let us speak with reverence of this wonderful genius.

George Brummell was 'a self-made man.' That