s. He condescended to
try for the Newdigate Prize poem, but his genius leaned far more to the
turn of a coat-collar than that of a verse, and, unhappily for the
British poets, their ranks were not to be dignified by the addition of
this illustrious man. The Newdigate was given to another; and so, to
punish Oxford, the competitor left it and poetry together, after having
adorned the old quadrangle of Oriel for less than a year.

He was now a boy of seventeen, and a very fine boy, too. To judge from a
portrait taken in later life, he was not strictly handsome; but he is
described as tall, well built, and of a slight and graceful figure.
Added to this, he had got from Eton and Oxford, if not much learning,
many a well-born friend, and he was toady enough to cultivate those of
better, and to dismiss those of less distinction. He was, through life,
a celebrated 'cutter,' and Brummell's cut was as much admired--by all
but the _cuttee_--as Brummel's coat. Then he had some L25,000 as capital
and how could he best invest it? He consulted no stockbroker on this
weighty point; he did not even buy a shilling book of advice such as we
have seen advertised for those who do not know what to do with their
money. The question was answered in a moment by the young worldling of
sixteen: he would enter a crack regiment and invest his guineas in the
thousand per cents. of fashionable life.

His namesake, the Regent, was now thirty-two, and had spent those years
of his life in acquiring the honorary title of the 'first gentleman of
Europe' by every act of folly, debauch, dissipation, and degradation
which a prince can conveniently perpetrate. He was the hero of London
society, which adored and backbit him alternately, and he was precisely
the man whom the boy Brummell would worship. The Regent was colonel of a
famous regiment of fops--the 10th Hussars. It was the most expensive,
the most impertinent, the best-dressed, the worst-moralled regiment in
the British army. Its officers, many of them titled, all more or less
distinguished in the trying campaigns of London seasons, were the
intimates of the Prince-Colonel. Brummell aspired to a cornetcy in this
brilliant regiment, and obtained it; nor that alone; he secured, by his
manners, o his dress, or his impudence, the favour and companionship--
friendship we cannot say--of the prince who commanded it.

By this step his reputation was made, and it was only necessary to keep
it up. He had an i