Touching dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a dandy specially is. A dandy is a clothes-wearing man,—a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object,—the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of clothes … has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius: he is inspired with cloth, a poet of cloth.
A fop who admires his person in a glass soon enters into a resolution of making his fortune by it, not questioning but every woman that falls in his way will do him as much justice as himself.
