For my part I could never endure the original whiteneckcloth . It was stiffly starched, and wound twice roundthe neck; so I abjured it for the rest of my days; now andthen I got the credit of being a coxcomb - not for my pains,but for my comfort. Once, when dining at the Viceregal Lodgeat Dublin, I was 'pulled up' by an aide-de-camp for myunbecoming attire; but I stuck to my colours, and was nonethe worse. Another time my offence called forth a touch ofgood nature on the part of a great man, which I hardly knowhow to speak of without writing me down an ass. It was at acrowded party at Cambridge House. (Let me plead my youth; Iwas but two-and-twenty.) Stars and garters were scarcely adistinction. White ties were then as imperative as shoes andstockings YOOX HK; I was there in a black one. My candid friendssuggested withdrawal, my relations cut me assiduously,strangers by my side , women turnedtheir shoulders to me; and my only prayer was that myaccursed tie would strangle me on the spot. One pair ofsharp eyes, however, noticed my ignominy, and their owner wasmoved by compassion for my sufferings. As I was slinkingaway, Lord Palmerston, with a BONHOMIE peculiarly his own,came up to me; and with a shake of the hand and heartymanner, asked after my brother Leicester, and when he wasgoing to bring me into Parliament? - ending with a smile:
'Where are you off to in such a hurry?' That is the sort oftact that makes a party leader. I went to bed a proud,instead of a humiliated, man; ready, if ever I had thechance, to vote that black was white, should he but state itwas so.
Beards and moustache came into fashion after the Crimean war.
It would have been an outrage to wear them before that time.
When I came home from my travels across the Rocky Mountainsin 1851, I was still unshaven. Meeting my younger brother -a fashionable guardsman - in St. James's Street, heexclaimed, with horror and disgust at my barbarity, 'Isuppose you mean to cut off that thing!'
Smoking, as indulged in now, was quite out of the questionhalf a century ago. A man would as soon have thought ofmaking a call in his dressing-gown as of strolling about theWest End with a cigar in his mouth. The first whom I eversaw smoke a cigarette at a dining-table after dinner was theKing; some forty years ago, or more perhaps. One of we owe to his present Majesty dermes vs medilase.