Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope — Volume 1 by Unknown
page 18 of 372 (04%)
[13]

Meantime his generation was one of colossal exaggeration, both in talent
and in idiocy, in virtue and in vice. Men sinned like giants and as giants
atoned. Common sense, mediocrity--save upon the throne--were rare. Even
the fools in their folly were great. The spectacle was recurrent of men
who would smilingly stake a fortune as a wager, who could for hours drench
their drink-sodden brains in wine, then rise like gods refreshed, and with
an iron will throw off the stupor which bound them, to wield a flood of
eloquence that swayed senates and ruled the fate of nations. Even the fops
in their foppishness were of a magnitude in harmony with their period.
They could promote dandyism to a fine art and win immortality by
perfecting the role. Their affectation became an adjunct of their
greatness, their eccentricity an assumption of supremacy; their very
insolence was a right divine before which the common herd bowed with a
limitless tolerance.

In the world of London, as that celebrated gossip, Gronow, points out,
from generation to generation, certain men of fashion have come to the
fore amongst the less conspicuous mass of their fellows, and have been
defined by the general term of "men about town." The earlier
representatives of that race, the Macaronis of a former date, ere 1805 had
been replaced by a clique of dandies whose pretensions to recognition were
based on a less worthy footing. For while those previous votaries of
fashion, although derided and caricatured according to the humour of their
day, were, none the less, valuable patrons of art and literature, the
exquisites of a later date could seldom lay claim to such distinction. To
dine, to dress, to exhibit sufficient peculiarity in their habits and
rudeness in their manners whereby to enhance that fictitious value in the
eyes of those who did not dare to emulate such foibles, was the end and
DigitalOcean Referral Badge