The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 3, October, 1894
General
The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 3, October, 1894
English literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Great Britain -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
were given in his honour night after night. Good Samaritans must have
approved when they found that at these entertainments great ladies
and courtesans brushed beautiful shoulders in utmost familiarity, but
those who delighted in the high charm of society doubtless shook their
heads. We need not, however, find it a flaw in George’s social bearing
that he did not check this kind of freedom. At the first, as a young
man full of life, of course he took everything as it came, joyfully. No
one knew better than he did, in later life, that there is a time for
laughing with great ladies and a time for laughing with courtesans. But
as yet it was not possible for him to exert influence. How great that
influence became I will indicate later on.
I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about,
in pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for
building had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of him
patronising the turf. But already he was implected with a passion for
dress, and seems to have erred somewhat on the side of dressing up,
as is the way of young men. It is fearful to think of him, as Cyrus
Redding saw him, “arrayed in deep-brown velvet, silver embroidered,
with cut-steel buttons, and a gold net thrown over all.” Before that
“gold net thrown over all,” all the mistakes of his after-life seem to
me to grow almost insignificant. Time, however, toned his too florid
sense of costume, and we should at any rate be thankful that his
imagination never deserted him. All the delightful munditiæ that we
find in the contemporary “fashion-plates for gentlemen” can be traced
to George himself. His were the much-approved “quadruple stock of
great dimension,” the “cocked grey-beaver,” the pantaloons of mauve
silk “negligently crinkled” and any number of other little pomps and
foibles of the kind. As he grew older and was obliged to abandon many
of his more vigorous pastimes, he grew more and more enamoured of
the pleasures of the wardrobe. He would spend hours, it is said, in
designing coats for his friends and liveries for his servants, and even
uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of giving away outmoded
clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what must have been the
finest collection of clothes that has been seen in modern times. With a
sentimentality that is characteristic of him he would often, as he sat,
crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct his servant to bring
him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or twenty or thirty years
before, and, when it was brought to him, spend much time in laughing or
sobbing over the memories that lay in its folds. It is pleasant to know
that George, during his long and various life, never forgot a coat,
however long ago worn, however seldom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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