The emoluments of this office enabled Orlando, as 'The Tatler' calls
him, to shine forth in all his glory. With an enviable indifference to
the future, he launched out into an expenditure which alone would have
made him popular in a country where the heaviest purse makes the
greatest gentleman. His lacqueys were arrayed in the brightest yellow
coats with black sashes--the Hapsburg colours. He had a carriage, of
course, but, like Sheridan's, it was hired, though drawn by his own
horses. This carriage was described as being shaped like a sea-shell;
and 'the Tatler' calls it 'an open tumbril of less size than ordinary,
to show the largeness of his limbs and the grandeur of his personage to
the best advantage.' The said limbs were Fielding's especial pride: he
gloried in the strength of his leg and arm; and when he walked down the
street, he was followed by an admiring crowd, whom he treated with as
much haughtiness as if he had been the emperor himself, instead of his
cousin five hundred times removed. He used his strength to good or bad
purpose, and was a redoubted fighter and bully, though good-natured
withal. In the Mall, as he strutted, he was the cynosure of all female
eyes. His dress had all the elegance of which the graceful costume of
that period was capable, though Fielding did not, like Brummell,
understand the delicacy of a quiet, but studied style. Those were
simpler, somewhat more honest days. It was not necessary for a man to
cloak his vices, nor be ashamed of his cloak. The beau then-a-day openly
and arrogantly gloried in the grandeur of his attire; and bragging was a
part of his character. Fielding was made by his tailor; Brummell made
his tailor: the only point in common to both was that neither of them
paid the tailor's bill.

The fine gentleman, under the Stuarts, was fine only in his lace and his
velvet doublet; his language was coarse, his manners coarser, his vices
the coarsest of all. No wonder when the king himself could get so drunk