es of Whiggism, too, had run low; and the velvet coat and
embroidered waistcoat, the costly buckles and gold buttons of better
days, were heavier drains on the decreasing revenues of the party than
could be long sustained with impunity. Fox had already assumed the
sloven--the whole faction followed; and the ghosts of the old
oppositionists, in their tie wigs and silver-laced coats, would have
been horrified by the sight of the shock-headed, leather-breeched, and
booted generation who howled and harangued on the left side of the
Speaker's chair from 1789 to 1806. All was _canaille_. Fox could
scarcely have been more shabby, had he been the representative of a
population of bankrupts. The remainder of the party might have been
supposed, without any remarkable stretch of imagination, to have emerged
from the workhouse. All was sincere squalidness, patriotic
pauperism--the _un_washing principle. One of the cleverest caricatures
of that cleverest of caricaturists, the Scotchman Gilray, was his sketch
of the Whigs preparing for their first levee after the Foxite accession
on the death of Pitt. The title was, "_Making decent!_" The whole of the
new ministry were exhibited in all the confusion of throwing off their
rags, and putting on their new clothing. There stood Sheridan,
half-smothered in the novel attempt to put on a clean shirt. In another
corner Fox, Grey, and Lord Moira, straining to peep into the same
shaving-glass, were all three making awkward efforts to use the
long-forgotten razor. Others were gazing at themselves in a sort of
savage wonder at the strangeness of new washed faces. Some _sans
culottes_ were struggling to get into breeches; and others, whose feet
were accustomed to the ventilation of shoes which let their toes
through, were pondering over the embarrassment of shoes impervious to
the air. The minor apparatus of court costume scattered round on the
chairs, the bags and swords, the buckles and gloves, were stared at by
the groups with the wonder and perplexity of an American Indian.

Into this irregular state of things Brummell made his first stride in
the spirit of a renovator. The prevailing cravat of the time was
certainly deplorable. Let us give it in the words of history:--"It was
without stiffening of any kind, and bagged out in front, _rucking_ up to
the front in a roll." (We do not precisely comprehend this expression,
whose _precision_, however, we by no means venture to doubt.) Brummell
boldl