' It
is generally near noon that he reaches the fourth room, the dressing-
room. The uninitiate can hardly realise how impressive is the
ceremonial there enacted. As I write, I can see, in memory, the whole
scene--the room, severely simple, with its lemon walls and deep
wardrobes of white wood, the young fops, philomathestatoi ton
neaniskon, ranged upon a long bench, rapt in wonder, and, in the
middle, now sitting, now standing, negligently, before a long mirror,
with a valet at either elbow, Mr. Le V., our cynosure. There is no
haste, no faltering, when once the scheme of the day's toilet has been
set. It is a calm toilet. A flower does not grow more calmly.
Any of us, any day, may see the gracious figure of Mr. Le V., as he
saunters down the slope of St. James's. Long may the sun irradiate the
surface of his tilted hat! It is comfortable to know that, though he
die to-morrow the world will not lack a most elaborate record of his
foppery. All his life he has kept or, rather, the current valets have
kept for him, a Journal de Toilette. Of this there are now fifty
volumes, each covering the space of a year. Yes, fifty springs have
filled his button-hole with their violets; the snow of fifty winters
has been less white than his linen; his boots have outshone fifty
sequences of summer suns, and the colours of all those autumns have
faded in the dry light of his apparel.
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