George Brummell went from Eton to Oriel College, Oxford, where his undergraduate career is traced in "Trebeck," a character in Lister's
Granby
(1826). From Oxford Brummell entered the Tenth Hussars, a favourite regiment of the Prince of Wales. Well-built and well-mannered, possessed of admirable tact, witty and original in conversation, inexhaustible in good temper and good stories, a master of impudence and banter, the new cornet made himself so agreeable to the prince that, at the latter's marriage, Brummell attended him, both at St. James's and to Windsor, as "a kind of
chevalier d'honneur
." In 1798 Brummell left the army with the rank of captain. A year later he came of age, and settled at 4, Chesterfield Street, Mayfair.
On his intimacy with the Prince Regent, Brummell founded the extraordinary position which he achieved in society. Fashion was in those days a power; and he was its dictator—the oracle, both for men and women, of taste, manners, and dress. His ascendency rested in some degree on solid foundations. He was not a mere fop, but conspicuous for the quiet neatness of his dress—for "a certain exquisite propriety," as Byron described it to Leigh Hunt—and, at a time when the opposite was common, for the scrupulous cleanliness of his person and his linen. An excellent dancer, clever at
vers de société
, an agreeable singer, a talented artist, a judge of china, buhl, and other objects of
virtù
, a collector of snuff-boxes, a connoisseur in canes, he had gifts which might have raised him above the Bond Street