Now, at the end of the Alderman's speech, in his copy of the City addresses, Mr. Isaac Reed has inserted the following note:--"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech (on the monument). It was penned by John Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the City and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Sayer, &c., at the Athenæum Club.--Isaac Reed." There can be little doubt that the worthy commentator and his friends were imposed upon. In the _Chatham Correspondence_, volume iii., p. 460, a letter from Sheriff Townsend to the Earl expressly states that with the exception of the words "and necessary" being left out before the word "revolution," the Lord Mayor's speech in the _Public Advertiser_ of the preceding day is verbatim. (The one delivered to the King.)--_Wright_--_Note to Walpole._
Gifford says (_Ben Jonson_, VI. 481) that Beckford never uttered before the King one syllable of the speech upon his monument; and Gifford's statement is fully confirmed both by Isaac Reed (as above) and by Maltby, the friend of Roger and Horne Tooke. Beckford _made_ a "remonstrance speech" to the King; but the speech on Beckford's monument is the after speech written for Beckford by Horne Tooke.--_See Mitford, Gray, and Mason's Correspondence_, pp. 438, 439.--_Cuningham's Note to Walpole_, v. 239.
Such is the historic worth of this strange piece of monumental bombast, upon which Pennant made this appropriate comment:--
The things themselves are neither scarce nor rare, The wonder's how the devil they got there.
[Illustration: Mr. John Farquhar over the ruins of Fonthill.]
[Illustration: Beau Brummel. (_From a miniature._)]
This celebrated leader of fashion in the times of the Regency--George Bryan Brummel--was born June 7, 1778. His grandfather was a pastrycook in Bury Street, St. James's, who, by letting off a large portion of his house, became a moneyed man. While Brummel's father was yet a boy, Mr. Jenkinson came to lodge there, and this led to the lad being employed in a Government office, when his lodger and patron had attained to eminence; he was subsequently private secretary to Lord Liverpool, and at his death, left the Beau little less than 30,000_l._ Brummel was sent to Eton, and thence to Oxford, and at sixteen he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the 10th Hussars, at that time commanded by the Prince of Wales, to whom he had been presented on the Terrace at Windsor, when the Beau was a boy at Eton. He became an associate of the Prince, then two-and-thirty, but who, according to Mr. Thomas Raikes, disdained not to take lessons in dress from Brummel at his lodgings. Thither would the future King of nations wend his way, where, absorbed in the mysteries of the toilet, he would remain till so late an hour that he sometimes sent his horses away, and insisted on Brummel giving him a quiet dinner, which generally ended in a deep potation.