He had quite as correct an eye with regard to harmony of shape as to that of colour. The highest in the land were not ashamed to seek a sort of professional opinion from this man as to the propriety of their costume. The Duke of Bedford once did this touching a coat. Brummell examined his Grace with the cool impertinence which was his Grace’s due. He turned him about, scanned him with scrutinizing, contemptuous eye, and then taking the lappel between his dainty finger and thumb, he exclaimed in a tone of pitying wonder, “Bedford! do you call this thing a coat?” But he did not spare his own relations. He was one day standing in the bow-window at White’s, amid a knot of well-dressed admirers, when one of them remarked, “Brummell, your brother William is in town. Is he not coming here?” “Yes,” said Brummell, “in a day or two; but I have recommended him to walk the back streets till his new clothes come home.” Brummell however may be excused if he became vain of his power. For a season he was undoubtedly the very King of Fashion, and a terrible despot he was; but he was flattered by kings, or by their representatives. The Prince of Wales passed long matutinal hours in Brummell’s dressing-room in Chesterfield-street, watching the progress of his friend’s toilet. The progress was occasionally so extended that the Prince would dismiss his equipage, invite himself to dinner, and the master and pupil, _Arcades ambo_, set to; and “fore gad, they made a night of it!” Never had tailor two such patrons as these two. The young lord, who numbered among what the “Clerical Tap-Tub”—as the clergy call a certain “religious” print, famous for its nasty advertisements—styles “perverts,” was nothing to these illustrious two. When the young lord of whom I speak was at Oxford, and got, as young lords sometimes _will_, into difficulties,—on the overhauling of his wardrobe, it was found that he had ordered, in seven months, upwards of three hundred and seventy waistcoats! The youthful aristocrat however was a follower of the two Georges, only “longo intervallo.” George Brummell’s wardrobe, indeed, dwindled down to the suit in which he died; but the wardrobe of the other George sold, after his death, for upwards of fifteen thousand pounds. How many a poor man might have been warmed beneath the cloth the Sovereign never used! The original cost of the wardrobe would not have surprised Alexander, but we do not live in the days of the Macedonian; and in the era of high-priced bread, England was half-appalled at the thought that a hundred thousand pounds had scarcely purchased what was sold for fifteen. Among it all was a celebrated cloak, the sable lining of which alone had originally cost eight hundred pounds. Lord Chesterfield, as little nice about wearing a cheap cast-off garment as one of his own lacqueys, procured this mantle for little more than a fourth of the original price of the lining.