every young and healthy living creature on earth appreciates.  So long as our young men are genuinely manly, good, strong, and courageous, I am not inclined to find fault with them, even if they happen to trip and fall into slight extravagances in the matter of costume.  The creature who lives to dress I abhor, the sane and sound man who fulfils his life-duties gallantly and who is not above pleasing himself and others by means of reasonable adornments I like and even respect warmly.  The philosophers may growl as they chose, but I contend that the sight of a superb young Englishman with his clean clear face, his springy limbs, his faultless habiliments is about as pleasant as anything can be to a discerning man.  Moreover, it is by no means true that the dandy is necessarily incompetent when he comes to engage in the severe work of life.  Our hero, our Nelson, kept his nautical dandyism until he was middle-aged.  Who ever accused him of incompetence?  Think of his going at Trafalgar into that pouring Inferno of lead and iron with all his decorations blazing on him!  “In honour I won them and in honour I will wear them,” said this unconscionable dandy; and he did wear them until he had broken our terrible enemy’s power, saved London from sack, and worse, and yielded up his gallant soul to his Maker.  Rather an impressive kind of dandy was that wizened little animal.  “There’ll be wigs on the green, boys—­the dandies are coming!” So Marlborough’s soldiers used to cry when the regiment of exquisites charged.  At home the fierce Englishmen strutted around in their merry haunts and showed off their brave finery as though their one task in life were to wear gaudy garments gracefully; but, when the trumpet rang for the charge, the silken dandies showed that they had the stuff of men in them.  The philosopher is a trifle too apt to say, “Anybody who does not choose to do as I like is, on the face of it, an inferior member of the human race.”  I utterly refuse to have any such doctrine thrust down my throat.  No sage would venture to declare that the handsome, gorgeous John Churchill was a fool or a failure.  He beat England’s enemies, he made no blunder in his life, and he survived the most vile calumnies that ever assailed a struggling man; yet, if he was not a dandy, then I never saw or heard of one.  All our fine fellows who stray with the British flag over the whole earth belong more or less distinctly to the dandy division.  The velvet glove conceals the iron hand; the pleasing modulated voice can rise at short notice to tones of command; the apparent languor will on occasion start with electric suddenness into martial vigour.  The lounging dandies who were in India when the red storm of the Mutiny burst from a clear sky suddenly became heroes who toiled, fought, lavished their strength and their blood, performed glorious prodigies of unselfish action, and snatched an empire from the fires of ruin.