er moved with the
times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last
he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young
men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and
romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very
curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism,
with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so
largely affect to despise.

Poor Beau Brummell. After having played his small part on life's stage,
his thin shade still occasionally wanders across the boards of the
theatre. Blanchard Jerrold wrote a play upon him, which was acted at the
Lyceum Theatre in 1859, when Emery played the title role. Jerrold's
play, which has for sub-title "The King of Calais," treats of that
period in Brummell's life in which he had retired across the channel to
live upon black-mail and to drift into that Consulship at Caen which he
so queerly resigned, to end a poor madman, trying to shave his own
peruke. Jerrold's is a grim play; either it or a version on the same
lines of Brummell's fall is being played across the Atlantic at this
very hour by Mr. Mansfield whose study of the final decay and idiotcy of
the famous beau is said to rival the impressiveness of his Mr. Hyde.
Beau Brummell is never likely to be quite forgotten. Folly often brings
with it a kind of immortality. The fool who fired the Temple of Ephesus
has secured his place in history with Aristides and Themistocles; the
fop who gave a kind of epic dignity to neck-clothes, and who asked the
famous "Who's your fat friend?" question, is remembered as a figure of
that age which includes the name of Sheridan and the name of Burke.

Another and a no less famous Beau steps to salute us from the pages of
the Whartons. Beau Nash is an old friend of ours in fiction, an old
friend in the drama. Our dear old Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel about
him yesterday; to-day he figures in the pages of one of the most
attractive of Mr. Lewis Wingfield's attractive stories. He found his
way on to the stage under the care of Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of
manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834. There is a
charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century
civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so "high
fantastical" in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal
verities contained in the clothes' philosophy of Herr