Being met limping in Bond-street, and asked what was the matter, he said he had hurt his leg, and “the worst of it was, it was his favourite leg.”
Somebody inquiring where he was going to dine next day, was told that he really did not know: “they put me in my coach and take me somewhere.”
He pronounced of a fashionable tailor that he made a good coat, an exceedingly good coat, all but the collar: nobody could achieve a good collar but Jenkins.
Having borrowed some money of a city beau, whom he patronised in return, he was one day asked to repay it; upon which he thus complained to a friend: “Do you know what has happened?”—“No.”—“Why, do you know, there’s that fellow, Tomkins, who lent me five hundred pounds, has had the face to ask me for it; and yet I had called the dog ‘Tom,’ and let myself dine with him.”
“You have a cold, Mr. Brummell,” observed a sympathizing group. “Why do you know,” said he, “that on the Brighton road, the other day, that infidel, Weston, (his valet,) put me into a room with a damp stranger.”
Being asked if he liked port, he said, with an air of difficult recollection, “Port? port?—Oh, port!—Oh, ay; what, the hot intoxicating liquor so much drank by the lower orders?”
Going to a rout, where he had not been invited, or rather, perhaps, where the host wished to mortify him, and attempted it, he turned placidly round to him, and, with a happy mixture of indifference and surprise, asked him his name. “Johnson,” was the answer. “Jauhnson,” said Brummell, recollecting, and pretending to feel for a card; “Oh, the name, I remember, was Thaun-son (Thompson;) and Jauhnson and Thaunson, you know, Jauhnson and Thaunson, are really so much the same kind of thing!”
A beggar petitioned him for charity “even if it was only a farthing.”—“Fellow,” said Mr. Brummell, softening the disdain of the appellation in the gentleness of his tone, “I don’t know the coin.”
Having thought himself invited to somebody’s country seat, and being given to understand, after one night’s lodging, that he was in error, he told an unconscious friend in town who asked him what sort of a place it was, that it was an “exceedingly good place for stopping one night in.”
Speaking lightly of a man, and wishing to convey his maximum of contemptuous feeling about him, he said, “He is a fellow, now, that would send his plate up twice for soup.”