nd on such an occasion as His Majesty's accession, could I
refuse it him?'

Nash was, proverbially more generous than just. He would not pay a debt
if he could help it, but would give the very amount to the first friend
that begged it. There was much ostentation in this, but then my friend
Nash _was_ ostentatious. One friend bothered him day and night for L20
that was owing to him, and he could not get it. Knowing his debtor's
character, he hit, at last, on a happy expedient, and sent a friend to
_borrow_ the money, 'to relieve his urgent necessities.' Out came the
bank note, before the story of distress was finished. The friend carried
it to the creditor, and when the latter again met Nash, he ought to have
made him a pretty compliment on his honesty.

Perhaps the King of Bath would not have tolerated in any one else the
juvenile frolics he delighted in after-years to relate of his own early
days. When at a loss for cash, he would do anything, but work, for a
fifty pound note, and having, in one of his trips, lost all his money
at York, the Beau undertook to 'do penance' at the minster door for that
sum. He accordingly arrayed himself--not in sackcloth and ashes--but in
an able-bodied blanket, and nothing else, and took his stand at the
porch, just at the hour when the dean would be going in to read service.
'He, ho,' cried that dignitary, who knew him, 'Mr. Nash in
masquerade?'--'Only a Yorkshire penance, Mr. Dean,' quoth the reprobate;
'for keeping bad company, too,' pointing therewith to the friends who
had come to see the sport.

This might be tolerated, but when in the eighteenth century a young man
emulates the hardiness of Godiva, without her merciful heart, we may not
think quite so well of him. Mr. Richard Nash, Beau Extraordinary to the
Kingdom of Bath, once rode through a village in that costume of which
even our first parent was rather ashamed, and that, too, on the back of
a cow! The wager was, I believe, considerable. A young Englishman did
something more respectable, yet quite as extraordinary, at Paris, not a
hundred years ago, for a small bet. He was one of the stoutest,
thickest-built men possible, yet being but eighteen, had neither whisker
nor moustache to masculate his clear English complexion. At the Maison
Doree one night he offered to ride in the Champs Elysees in a lady's
habit, and not be mistaken for a man. A friend undertook to dress him,
and went all over Paris to hire a habit that would