What possible use can a man have for ten million shirts?
The Earl of Surrey, afterwards eleventh Duke of Norfolk, who was a notorious gormand and hard drinker, and a leading member of the Beefsteak Club, was so far from cleanly in his person that his servants used to avail themselves of his fits of drunkenness—which were pretty frequent, by the way, for the purpose of washing him. On these occasions they stripped him as they would a corpse, and performed the needful ablutions. He was equally notorious for his horror of clean linen. One day, on his complaining to his physician that he had become a perfect martyr to rheumatism, and had tried every possible remedy without success, the latter wittily replied, “Pray, my lord, did you ever try a clean shirt?”
Dr. Davy’s remarkable oddity of dress did not end here. He took to fishing: we have noticed his writing on angling elsewhere. He was often seen on the river’s banks, in season and out of season, “in a costume that must have been a source of no common amusement to the river nymphs. His coat and breeches were of a bright green cloth. His hat was what Dr. Paris describes as ‘having been intended for a coal-heaver, but as having been dyed green, in its raw state, by some sort of pigment.’ In this attire Davy flattered himself that he closely resembled vegetable life”—which was not intended to scare away the fishes.
HOW POOR TOMMY WAS LOST.
This reminds me of Mrs. Pettigrew’s little boy “Tommy.” Never heard of it? “Well,” says Mrs. Pettigrew, “I never again will dress a child in green. You see,”—very affectedly,—“I used to put a jacket and hood on little Tommy all of beautiful green color, till one day he was playing out on the grass, looking so green and innocent, when along came a cow, and eat poor little Tommy all up, mistaking him for a cabbage.”
Mrs. H. Davy was as curious in dress as the doctor. “One day”—it is told for the truth—“the lady accompanied her husband to Paris, and walking in the Tuileries, wearing the fashionable London bonnet of the period,—shaped like a cockle-shell,—and the doctor dressed in his green, they were mistaken for masqueraders, and a great crowd of astonished Parisians began staring at the couple.
“Their discomfiture had hardly commenced when the garden inspector informed the lady that nothing of the kind could be permitted on the grounds, and requested a withdrawal.
“The rabble increased, and it became necessary to order a guard of infantry to remove ‘la belle Anglaise’ safely, surrounded by French bayonets.”
