(Let me plead my youth; I
was but two-and-twenty.) Stars and garters were scarcely a
distinction.
White ties were then as imperative as shoes and
stockings; I was there in a black one. My candid friends
suggested withdrawal, my relations cut me assiduously,
strangers by my side whispered at me aloud, women turned
their shoulders to me; and my only prayer was that my
accursed tie would strangle me on the spot. One pair of
sharp eyes, however, noticed my ignominy, and their owner was
moved by compassion for my sufferings. As I was slinking
away, Lord Palmerston, with a BONHOMIE peculiarly his own,
came up to me; and with a shake of the hand and hearty
manner, asked after my brother Leicester, and when he was
going to bring me into Parliament? - ending with a smile:
'Where are you off to in such a hurry?' That is the sort of
tact that makes a party leader. I went to bed a proud,
instead of a humiliated, man; ready, if ever I had the
chance, to vote that black was white, should he but state it
was 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 Mountains
in 1851, I was still unshaven. Meeting my younger brother -
a fashionable guardsman - in St. James's Street, he
exclaimed, with horror and disgust at my barbarity, 'I
suppose you mean to cut off that thing!'
Smoking, as indulged in now, was quite out of the question
half a century ago.
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