The Life of Beau Nash by Oliver Goldsmith

Aprons were not the only red rags to the bull of ceremony.  He was quite as unflinching an enemy to top-boots.  He had already banished swords from the assembly-room, because their clash frightened the ladies, and their scabbards tore people's dresses.  But boots were not so easily banished.  The country squires liked to ride into the city, and, leaving their horses at a stable, walk straight into the dignity of the minuet.  Nash, who had a genius for propriety, saw how hateful this was, and determined to put a stop to it.  He slew top-boots and aprons at the same time, and with the shaft of Apollo.  He indicted a poem on the occasion, and a very good example of satire by irony it is.  It is short enough to quote entire:

FRONTINELLA'S INVITATION TO THE ASSEMBLY.

Come, one and all,

To Hoyden Hall,

For there's th' Assembly to-night. 

None but prude fools

Mind manners and rules,

We Hoydens do decency slight. 

Come, Trollops and Slatterns,

Cocked hats and white aprons,

This best our modesty suits;

For why should not we

In dress be as free

As Hogs-Norton squires in boots?

Why, indeed? But the Hogs-Norton squires, as is their wont, were not so easily pierced to the heart as the noble slatterns.  Nash turned Aristophanes, and depicted on a little stage a play in which Mr Punch, under very disgraceful circumstances, excused himself for wearing boots by quoting the practice of the pump-room beaux.  This seems to have gone to the conscience of Hogs-Norton at last; but what really gave the death-blow to top-boots, as a part of evening dress, was the incident of Nash's going up to a gentleman, who had made his appearance in the ball-room in this unpardonable costume, and remarking, "bowing in an arch manner," that he appeared to have "forgotten his horse."

It had not been without labour and a long struggle that Nash had risen to this position of unquestioned authority at Bath.  His majestic rule was the result of more than half a century of painstaking.  He had been born far back in the seventeenth century, so far back that, incredible as it sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had supplied Vanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his comedy of Aesop.  But after trying many forms of life, and weary of his own affluence, he came to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb.  Queen Anne had been obliged to divert herself, in 1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy, and with country dances on the bowling-green.  The lodgings were dingy and expensive, the pump-house had no director, the nobility had haughtily withdrawn from such vulgar entertainments as the city now alone afforded.  The famous and choleric physician, Dr Radcliffe, in revenge for some slight he had endured, had threatened to "throw a toad into King Bladud's Well," by writing a pamphlet against the medicinal efficacy of the waters.

The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, which had been slowly declining since the days of Elizabeth, was threatened with extinction when Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius for organisation, and in half a century he made it what he left it when he died in his eighty-ninth year, the most elegant and attractive of the smaller social resorts of Europe.  Such a man, let us be certain, was not wholly ridiculous.  There must have been something more in him than in a mere idol of the dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistible buck and lady-killer, like Lauzun.  In these latter men the force is wholly destructive; they are animated by a feline vanity, a tiger-spirit of egotism.  Against the story of Nash and the Duchess of Queensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdote that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting the hand of another duchess under his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper into the flesh.  In all the repertory of Nash's extravagances there is not one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force.  He was fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt.