urtesans brushed beautiful shoulders
in utmost familiarity, but those who delighted in the high charm of
society probably shook their heads. We need not, however, find it a flaw
in Georges social bearing that he did not check this kind of freedom. At
the first, as a young man full of life, of course he took everything as
it came, joyfully. No one knew better than he did, in later life, that
there is a time for laughing with great ladies and a time for laughing
with courtesans. But as yet it was not possible for him to exert
influence. How great that influence became I will suggest hereafter.

I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about, in
pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for building
had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of him patronising
the Turf. But already he was implected with a passion for dress and
seems to have erred somewhat on the side of dressing up, as is the way
of young men. It is fearful to think of him, as Cyrus Redding saw
him, 'arrayed in deep-brown velvet, silver embroidered, with cut-steel
buttons, and a gold net thrown over all.' Before that 'gold net thrown
over all,' all the mistakes of his afterlife seem to me to grow almost
insignificant. Time, however, toned his too florid sense of costume, and
we should at any rate be thankful that his imagination never deserted
him. All the delightful munditiae that we find in the contemporary
'fashion-plates for gentlemen' can be traced to George himself. His
were the much-approved 'quadruple stock of great dimension,' the 'cocked
grey-beaver,' 'the pantaloons of mauve silk negligently crinkled' and
any number of other little pomps and foibles of the kind. As he grew
older and was obliged to abandon many of his more vigorous pastimes, he
grew more and more enamoured of the pleasures of the wardrobe. He would
spend hours, it is said, in designing coats for his friends, liveries
for his servants, and even uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of
giving away outmoded clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what
must have been the finest collection of clothes that has been seen in
modern times. With a sentimentality that is characteristic of him, he
would often, as he sat, crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct
his servant to bring him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or
twenty or thirty years before, and, when it was brought to him, spend
much time in laughing or sobbing ove