The emoluments of this office enabled Orlando, as ‘The Tatler’ calls him, to shine forth in all his glory.  With an enviable indifference to the future, he launched out into an expenditure which alone would have made him popular in a country where the heaviest purse makes the greatest gentleman.  His lacqueys were arrayed in the brightest yellow coats with black sashes—­the Hapsburg colours.  He had a carriage, of course, but, like Sheridan’s, it was hired, though drawn by his own horses.  This carriage was described as being shaped like a sea-shell; and ‘the Tatler’ calls it ’an open tumbril of less size than ordinary, to show the largeness of his limbs and the grandeur of his personage to the best advantage.’  The said limbs were Fielding’s especial pride:  he gloried in the strength of his leg and arm; and when he walked down the street, he was followed by an admiring crowd, whom he treated with as much haughtiness as if he had been the emperor himself, instead of his cousin five hundred times removed.  He used his strength to good or bad purpose, and was a redoubted fighter and bully, though good-natured withal.  In the Mall, as he strutted, he was the cynosure of all female eyes.  His dress had all the elegance of which the graceful costume of that period was capable, though Fielding did not, like Brummell, understand the delicacy of a quiet, but studied style.  Those were simpler, somewhat more honest days.  It was not necessary for a man to cloak his vices, nor be ashamed of his cloak.  The beau then-a-day openly and arrogantly gloried in the grandeur of his attire; and bragging was a part of his character.  Fielding was made by his tailor; Brummell made his tailor:  the only point in common to both was that neither of them paid the tailor’s bill.

The fine gentleman, under the Stuarts, was fine only in his lace and his velvet doublet; his language was coarse, his manners coarser, his vices the coarsest of all.  No wonder when the king himself could get so drunk with Sedley and Buckhurst as to be unable to give an audience appointed for; and when the chief fun of his two companions was to divest themselves of all the habiliments which civilization has had the ill taste to make necessary, and in that state run about the streets.

‘Orlando’ wore the finest ruffles and the heaviest sword; his wig was combed to perfection; and in his pocket he carried a little comb with which to arrange it from time to time, even as the dandy of to-day pulls out his whiskers or curls his moustache.  Such a man could not be passed over; and accordingly he numbered half the officers and gallants of the town among his intimates.  He drank, swore, and swaggered, and the snobs of the day proclaimed him a ‘complete gentleman.’

His impudence, however, was not always tolerated.  In the playhouses of the day, it was the fashion for some of the spectators to stand upon the stage, and the places in that position were chiefly occupied by young gallants.  The ladies came most in masques:  but this did not prevent Master Fielding from making his remarks very freely, and in no very refined strain to them.  The modest damsels, whom Pope has described,