BEAU BRUMMEL-ISMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 84, 10 April 1933, Page 17

BEAU BRUMMEL-ISMS.

PERTINENT AND IMPERTINENT "I ONCE ATE A PEA." Having taken it into his head not to eat vegetables, the celebrated Beau Brummel was asked by a lady if he had never eaten any in his life- "Yes, madam," Beau replied, "I once ate a pea." Met limping in Bond Street, London, and asked what was the matter, Brummel said that he had hurt his leg, and "the worst of it was, it was his favourite leg." Somebody inquiring where he was going to day, was told that Brummel really did not know. "They put me in a coach and take me somewhere." Having borrowed money of a city beau, whom he patronised in return, Brummel was asked to repay it. He thus complained to a friend: "Do you know what has happened?" "No." "Why, do you know, there's that fellow Tom kins, who lent me five hundred pounds. He has had the face to ask me for it; and yet I had called the dog 'Tom,' and let myself dine with him." "You have a cold, Mr. Brummel," observed a sympathising group. "Why, do you know," said he, "that on the Brighton road, the other day, that infidel Weston (his valet) put me into a room with a damp stranger." Asked if he liked port, Brummel said, "Port? Port? Oh, port! Oh, ay. What, the hot intoxicating liquor so much drunk by the lower orders?" Going to a rout, where he had not been invited, or rather, perhaps, where the host wished to mortify him, and attempted it, Brummel turned placidly round to him, and, with a happy mixture of indifference and surprise, asked him his name. "Johnson," was the answer. "Jauhnson," said Brummel, recollecting, and pretending to feel for a card; "Oh, the name I remember was Thaunson (Thompson) and Jaunson and Thaunson you know, Jaunson and Thaunson are really so much the, same kind of thing!" A beggar petitioned Brummel for charity, even if it was only a farthing. "Fellow," said Brummel, softening the disdain of the appellation in the gentleness of his tone, "I don't know the coin." Having thought himself invited to somebody's country seat, and given to understand, after one night's lodging, that he was in error, Brummel told an unconscious friend who asked him what sort of a place it was, that it was an "exceedingly good place for stopping one night in."

Speaking lightly of a man and wishing to convey his maximum of contemptuous feeling about him, Brummel said, "He is a fellow, now, that would send his plate up twice for soup."

It was supposed that Brummel failed in a matrimonial speculation; a friend condoled with him. Brummel smiled, with an air of better knowledge on that point, and said, "Why, sir, the truth is, I had great reluctance in cutting the connection; but what could I do? I discovered that the wretch positively ate cabbage."