THE LIVERY OF FAMOUS MEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1974, 19 September 1889, Page 32

THE LIVERY OF FAMOUS MEN.

" He had a double gold chain outside his waistcoat and such breast pins that I thought he looked like one of our river gamblers." Such is the description of Charles Dickens, given by Prentice in an account of his tour of the United States. A tendency for overdressing was always one of Dickens' characteristics. " A very spruce man,"i 3 the description given of the famous novelist by another writer ; "he brushed his coat frequently, changed his collars several times in a day, and combed his hair a hundred times a day."

A photograph of Dickens, taken in 1852, shows him in a frock coat with a broad relvet collar, a waistcoat made of some furry stuff, and a trousers of some huge check. Percy Fitzgerald says the French painter's remark that Dickens was " more like one of the old Dutch admirals we see in the picture galleries than a man of letters," conveys an admirably true idea to his friends.

John Bright wore a black velvet waistcoat long after other people had ceased to wear one. " The first time I saw Archbishop Whately," said the Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, "he wore a pea-green coat, a white waistcoat, stone-coloured shorts, fleshcoloured stockings. Bishop Heber was dressed in a parsley and butter coat. Dr Arnold in a light blue coat with metal buttons and a buff waistcoat."

Professor Sedgwick, after a hard morning's geological work, betook himself to a village inn for a lunch of bread and cheese. When he asked what he had to pay he was told id. He could not avoid remarking on the smallness of the charge.

" Ah, sir," said the landlady, " I should ask 8d from anyone else, but I only asked 4d from you, for I see that you have known better days."

At another time a lady stopped by the roadside where he was working, made some inquiries, and gave him a shilling, because his answers were so intelligent for his station. He met the lady at dinner next day, to her great astonishment.

Charles Lamb always dressed in black. " I take it," be says, " to be the proper costume of an author." When this was once objected to at a wedding, he pleaded the raven's apology in the fable that "he had no other." His clothes were entirely black, and he wore long black gaiters up to the knees. Southey wore clogs as well as his children ; he had a fawn-coloured all-round coat and a cap with a neb to it. He never put on a swallow-tailed coat. Like Southey, Porson, the great Greek scholar, had an utter contempt for appearances. When Hazlitt met him in the library of the London Institution he was dressed in an old rusty, black coat, with Gobwebs hanging to the skirt, and with a large patch of coarse brown paper covering the whole length of his nose.