'So, then, sa-ar--you think me a fool?'

'By no means; I know you to be one,' quoth Sherry, and turned away. It
is due to both the parties to this anecdote to state that it is quite
apocryphal, and rests on the slenderest authority. However, whether fool
or not, Brummell has one certain, though small, claim upon certain small
readers. Were you born in a modern generation, when scraps of poetry
were forbidden in your nursery, and no other pabulum was offered to your
infant stomach, but the rather dull biographies of rather dull, though
very upright men?--if so, I pity you. Old airs of a jaunty jig-like kind
are still haunting the echoes of my brain. Among them is--

'The butterfly was a gentleman,
Which nobody can refute:
He left his lady-love at home,
And roamed in a velvet suit.'

I remember often to have ruminated over this character of an innocent,
and, I believe, calumniated, insect. He was a gentleman, and the
consequences thereof were twofold: he abandoned the young woman who had
trusted her affections to him, and attired his person in a complete
costume of the best Lyons silk-velvet, _not_ the proctor's velvet, which
Theodore felt with thumb and finger, impudently asking 'how much a
yard?' I secretly resolved to do the same thing as Mr. Butterfly when I
came of age. But the said Mr. Butterfly had a varied and somewhat awful
history, all of which was narrated in various ditties chanted by my
nurse. I could not quite join in her vivid assertion that she _would_

'----be a butterfly,
Born in a bower,