giving him a quiet dinner, 'which generally ended in a deep potation.'

There are, no doubt, many fabulous myths floating about concerning this
illustrious man; and his biographer, Captain Jesse, seems anxious to
defend him from the absurd stories of French writers, who asserted that
he employed two glovers to covers his hands, to one of whom were
intrusted the thumbs, to the other the fingers and hand, and three
barbers to dress his hair, while his boots were polished with champagne,
his cravats designed by a celebrated portrait painter, and so forth.
These may be pleasant inventions, but Captain Jesse's own account of his
toilet, even when the Beau was broken, and living in elegant poverty
abroad, is quite absurd enough to render excusable the ingenious
exaggerations of the foreign writer.

The _batterie de toilette_, we are told, was of silver, and included a
spitting-dish, for its owner said 'he could not spit into clay.'
Napoleon shaved himself, but Brummell was not quite great enough to do
that, just as my Lord So-and-so walks to church on Sunday, while his
neighbour, the Birmingham millionaire, can only arrive there in a
chariot and pair.

His ablutions took no less than two whole hours! What knowledge might
have been gained, what good done in the time he devoted to rubbing his
lovely person with a hair-glove! Cleanliness was, in fact, Brummell's
religion; perhaps because it is generally set down as 'next to
godliness,' a proximity with which the Beau was quite satisfied, for he
never attempted to pass on to that next stage. Poor fool, he might rub
every particle of moisture off the skin of his body--he might be clean
as a kitten--but he could not and did not purify his mind with all this
friction; and the man who would have fainted to see a black speck upon