But what with my Nivernois hat can compare,
Bag-wig, and laced ruffles, and black solitaire?
And what can a man of true fashion denote,
Like an ell of good ribbon tied under the throat?
My buckles and box are in exquisite taste,
The one is of paper, the other of paste.”
Fox, when a very young man, was a prodigious dandy, wearing a little odd French hat, shoes with red heels, etc. He and Lord Carlisle once travelled from Paris to Lyons for the express purpose of buying waistcoats; and during the whole journey they talked about nothing else. (S. Rogers, Table Talk.)
Jane Austen’s brother Edward would dress, as befitted his position, with greater variety of colour and style than his clergyman father and brother. It was the usual thing for a clergyman to dress in black, with knee-breeches and white stock, but it was not essential. In Northanger Abbey when Henry Tilney is first introduced to Catherine in the Lower Rooms at Bath, there is nothing in his attire to indicate that he is a clergyman, a fact which she only learns subsequently.
In ordinary civilian dress, men wore long green, blue, or brown cloth coats with stocks and frilled ruffles. In the Man of Feeling a man casually met with is wearing “a brownish coat with a narrow gold edging, and his companion an old green frock with a buff coloured waistcoat,” while an ex-footman trying to play the gentleman has on “a white frock and a red laced waistcoat.”
At that time footgear for men consisted of slippers in the house, and riding-boots for out of doors. When Beau Nash was forming the assemblies at Bath, as has been said he made a dead set against the habit some men had of wearing boots in the dancing-room. “The gentlemen’s boots also made a very desperate stand against him, the country squires were by no means submissive to his usurpations, and probably his authority alone would never have carried him through, had he not reinforced it with ridicule.” His ridicule took the form of a squib, one verse of which was as follows:—