In spite of all his efforts, the Prince was about this time eclipsed in Hyde Park, for a man, who largely owed his position to Royal favour, outstripped him in the elegance and costliness of his dress. This was Beau Brummel, the son of one of the Whitehall Secretaries. His aunt, Mrs. Searle, lived as gate-keeper of the Green Park, inhabiting a little cottage in a small enclosure in which she kept cows. This good body often received visits from the Princes and Princesses, and it was here that the Prince Regent met the youthful Brummel, and was so attracted by him that he secured for him a commission in the army. Hyde Park saw much of this dandy in his finery, with his mincing ways and absurd conceits. He scored heavily for a time, but was destined to end his days in poverty. In 1800, George III. was reviewing the Grenadier Guards in the Park, when a musket-ball entered the leg of a gentleman standing a few yards from him, piercing his thigh. It was subsequently found that the ball had gone through the coat of a Frenchman, and also struck a boy on the way. His Majesty remained where he was, and laughed the matter off. It was, however, thought to be an attempt on his life—a true surmise evidently, for a pistol was fired at him in the theatre the same evening. After the overdressing of earlier days, with a superabundance of stuffs and ruffs, fashion had reduced the feminine attire to a sparseness that was indecent, and brought indignant denunciation from both the Pope and the Protestant clergy. The last year of the eighteenth century was a distinguished one in Hyde Park, on account of the number of beautiful women to be seen driving there. Many of them handled the ribbons in fine form, chief in this art being the Marchioness of Donegall and the Countess of Mansfield. A figure, long to adorn the Park with his presence, was Sir Arthur Wellesley. He was a faithful lover of the Row and those more secluded roads to the west and north, where he generally rode a beautiful Arab horse, and these graceful animals became the vogue. Humble heroes as well were brought to mind, for the King granted a little cottage near the Royal Humane Society’s House—not the present one, which was opened later by Sir Arthur Wellesley when Duke of Wellington—to Mrs. Sims, an unfortunate woman who had lost all her six sons in battle. Strutt, writing in his _Sports and Pastimes_ in 1801, says: “I have seen, some years back, when the Serpentine River in Hyde Park was frozen over, four gentlemen there dance, if I may be allowed the expression, a double minuet in skates with as much ease, and I think more elegance, than in a ballroom; others again, by turning and winding with much adroitness, have already in succession described upon the ice the form of all the letters of the alphabet.”