The following letter we look upon as quite sufficient to have excluded him from the recollections of any Lady Jane on earth, if she happened to know the difference between coxcombry and common feeling:—
“My dear Lady Jane,—With the miniature, it seems, I am not to be trusted even for two pitiful hours. My own memory must be then my only disconsolate expedient to obtain a resemblance.
“As I am unwilling to merit the imputation of committing myself by too flagrant a liberty in retaining your glove, which you charitably sent at my head yesterday, as you would have extended an eleemosynary sixpence to the supplicating hat of a mendicant, I restore it to you. And, allow me to assure you, that I have too much regard and respect for you, and too little practical vanity myself, (whatever appearances may be against me,) to have entertained, for one treacherous instant, the impertinent intention to defraud you of it. You are angry, perhaps irreparably incensed against me for this petty larceny. I have no defence to offer in mitigation but that of frenzy. But you know that you are an angel visiting these sublunary spheres, and therefore your first quality should be that of mercy. Yet you are sometimes wayward and volatile in your seraphic disposition. Though you have no wings yet you have weapons, and those are resentment and estrangement from me.—With sentiments of the deepest compunction, I am always your miserable slave,
“George Brummell.”
We have not a doubt that he perused this toilsome performance a dozen times before he folded it up, advanced to his mirror to see how so brilliant a correspondent must look after so astonishing a production, moved round the room in a minuet step; and, when he sent it away at last, followed it with a sigh at the burial of so much renown in a woman’s escritoire, and a regret that it could not be stereotyped to make its progress round the world. And yet, as it appeared that the lady had thrown the glove at him, and even lent him her miniature, it would be difficult to discover any ground for her wrath or his compunction. Both were evidently equally imaginary.
The Beau always regarded the city as a terra incognita. A merchant once asked him to dine there. Brummell gave him a look of intense enquiry. The merchant pressed him. “Well,” said the Beau, (who probably had excellent reasons for non-resistance to the man of money;) “well, if it must be—but you must first promise faithfully never to say a word on the subject.”
A visitor, full of the importance of a tour in the north of England, asked him which of the lakes he preferred. “I can’t possibly remember,” was the reply; “they are a great way from St James’s Street, and I don’t think they are spoken of in the clubs.” The visitor urged the question. “Robinson,” said the Beau, turning in obvious distress to his valet, “Robinson, pray tell this gentleman which of the lakes I preferred.”—“Windermere, sir, I think it was,” said the valet. “Well,” added Brummell, “probably you are in the right, Robinson. It may have been. Pray, sir, will Windermere do?”
“I wonder, Brummell, you take the trouble of driving to the barracks of the 10th with four horses. It certainly looks rather superb,” said one of the officers. “Why, I dare say it does; but that is not the point. What could I do, when my French valet, the best dresser of hair in the universe, gave me warning that he must leave me to myself, unless I gave up the vulgarity of posting with two?”
We come, in the course of this goodly history, to the second great event of the Beau’s life—the first being his introduction to Carlton House. The second was his being turned out of it. Brummell always denied, and with some indignation, the story of “Wales, ring the bell!”—a version which he justly declared to be “positively vulgar,” and therefore, with due respect for his own sense of elegance, absolutely impossible for him. He gave the more rational explanation, that he had taken the part of lady who was presumed to be the rival of Mrs Fitzherbert, and had been rash enough even to make some remarks on Mrs Fitzherbert’s en bon point, a matter of course never to be forgiven by a belle. This extended to a “declining love” between him and the Prince, whose foible was a horror of growing corpulent, and whom Brummell therefore denominated “Big Ben,” the nickname of a gigantic porter at Carlton House; adding the sting of calling Mrs Fitzherbert Benina. Moore, in one of his satires on the Prince’s letter of February the 13th, 1812, to the Duke of York, in which he cut the Whigs, thus parodies that celebrated “sentence of banishment:”—
“Neither have I resentments, nor wish there should come ill
To mortal, except, now I think on’t, Beau Brummell,
Who threaten’d, last year, in a super-fine passion,
To cut me, and bring the old king into fashion.”