Beaux have always been a fruitful and pleasant theme for the satirist’s pen. The _Spectator_, in No. 275, describes the dissection of a beau’s head, which is found to contain no brain, but in the usual place for one, smelling strongly of essences and orange-flower water, a kind of horny substance, cut into a thousand little faces or mirrors. Further, a lot of ribbons, laces, and embroidery, billets-doux, love-letters, snuff, fictions, vows, oaths, and a spongy substance, known as nonsense. A muscle, not often discovered in dissections, was found, the _os cribriforme_, which draws the nose upwards when by that motion it intends to express contempt. The ogling muscles were very much worn with use. The individual to whom this head had belonged had passed for a man for about thirty years, and died in the flower of his youth by the blow of a fire-shovel, he having been surprised by an eminent citizen as he was paying some attentions to his wife. This analysis of a beau’s head, or character, was written in 1712. In 1757 an essayist described him thus in doggerel:
’Would you a modern beau commence, Shake off that foe to pleasure, sense. Scorn real, unaffected worth, Despise the virtuous, good and brave, To ev’ry passion be a slave.... Be it your passion, joy and fame To play at ev’ry modish game.... Harangue on fashion, point and lace.... Affect to know each reigning belle That throngs the playhouse or the Mall. Though swearing you detest a fool, Be versed in Folly’s ample school.... These rites observed, each foppish elf May view an emblem of himself.’
The combination of wit and beau in one person has, nevertheless, occasionally been seen, and the ordinary, or numskulled, beau has shared in the reputation created by such a combination, just as all judges are assumed to be sober. But in the days when beaux flourished wit of a very attenuated kind tickled the fancy of the public, who haunted the taverns patronized by the so-called wits. Even the jokes which passed at the Mermaid between Shakspere, Ben Jonson, and other professed jesters must appear to modern readers who are not absurdly prepossessed in favour of all that savours of antiquity, as heavy, dull, and often far-fetched. To justify what may appear rank heresy, let me quote one of Tarleton’s ’witty’ sayings. Tarleton was Shakspere’s friend and fellow-actor, _the_ low comedian of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, who probably suggested to Shakspere some of his jesters and fools. Now, this is what is transmitted to us as a specimen of his wit: Tarleton, keeping an ordinary in Paternoster Row, would approve of mustard standing before his customers to have wit. ’How so?’ inquired one. ’It is like a witty scold, meeting another scold, begins to scold first. So,’ says he, ’the mustard, being licked up and knowing that you will bite it, begins to bite you first.’ ’I’ll try that,’ says a gull, and the mustard so tickled him that his eyes watered. ’How now?’ says Tarleton. ’Does my jest savour?’ ’Ay,’ says the gull, ’and bite too.’ ’If you had had better wit,’ says Tarleton, ’you would have bit first. So, then, conclude with me that dumb, unfeeling mustard has more wit than a talking, unfeeling fool, as you are.’ And this was considered ’a rare conceit’ in the days of Shakspere. We are rather more exacting now.