Mens Wives | Page 7

in 1820, he
was a very young-looking person considering his age. His figure was
active and slim, his leg neat, and he had not in his whiskers a single
white hair.
It must, however, be owned that he used Mr. Eglantine's Regenerative
Unction (which will make your whiskers as black as your boot), and, in
fact, he was a pretty constant visitor at that gentleman's emporium;
dealing with him largely for soaps and articles of perfumery, which he
had at an exceedingly low rate. Indeed, he was never known to pay Mr.
Eglantine one single shilling for those objects of luxury, and, having
them on such moderate terms, was enabled to indulge in them pretty
copiously. Thus Mr. Walker was almost as great a nosegay as Mr.
Eglantine himself: his handkerchief was scented with verbena, his hair
with jessamine, and his coat had usually a fine perfume of cigars,
which rendered his presence in a small room almost instantaneously
remarkable. I have described Mr. Walker thus accurately, because, in
truth, it is more with characters than with astounding events that this
little history deals, and Mr. Walker is one of the principal of our
dramatis personae.
And so, having introduced Mr. W., we will walk over with him to Mr.
Eglantine's emporium, where that gentleman is in waiting, too, to have
his likeness taken.
There is about an acre of plate glass under the Royal arms on Mr.
Eglantine's shop-window; and at night, when the gas is lighted, and the
washballs are illuminated, and the lambent flame plays fitfully over
numberless bottles of vari-coloured perfumes--now flashes on a case of
razors, and now lightens up a crystal vase, containing a hundred
thousand of his patent tooth-brushes--the effect of the sight may be
imagined. You don't suppose that he is a creature who has those odious,
simpering wax figures in his window, that are called by the vulgar
dummies? He is above such a wretched artifice; and it is my belief that
he would as soon have his own head chopped off, and placed as a
trunkless decoration to his shop-window, as allow a dummy to figure
there. On one pane you read in elegant gold letters "Eglantinia"--'tis his
essence for the handkerchief; on the other is written "Regenerative
Unction"--'tis his invaluable pomatum for the hair.

There is no doubt about it: Eglantine's knowledge of his profession
amounts to genius. He sells a cake of soap for seven shillings, for
which another man would not get a shilling, and his tooth-brushes go
off like wildfire at half-a-guinea apiece. If he has to administer rouge or
pearl-powder to ladies, he does it with a mystery and fascination which
there is no resisting, and the ladies believe there are no cosmetics like
his. He gives his wares unheard-of names, and obtains for them sums
equally prodigious. He CAN dress hair--that is a fact--as few men in
this age can; and has been known to take twenty pounds in a single
night from as many of the first ladies of England when ringlets were in
fashion. The introduction of bands, he says, made a difference of two
thousand pounds a year in his income; and if there is one thing in the
world he hates and despises, it is a Madonna. "I'm not," says he, "a
tradesman--I'm a HARTIST" (Mr. Eglantine was born in London)--"I'm
a hartist; and show me a fine 'ead of air, and I'll dress it for nothink."
He vows that it was his way of dressing Mademoiselle Sontag's hair,
that caused the count her husband to fall in love with her; and he has a
lock of it in a brooch, and says it was the finest head he ever saw,
except one, and that was Morgiana Crump's.
With his genius and his position in the profession, how comes it, then,
that Mr. Eglantine was not a man of fortune, as many a less clever has
been? If the truth must be told, he loved pleasure, and was in the hands
of the Jews. He had been in business twenty years: he had borrowed a
thousand pounds to purchase his stock and shop; and he calculated that
he had paid upwards of twenty thousand pounds for the use of the one
thousand, which was still as much due as on the first day when he
entered business. He could show that he had received a thousand dozen
of champagne from the disinterested money-dealers with whom he
usually negotiated his paper. He had pictures all over his "studios,"
which had been purchased in the same bargains. If he sold his goods at
an enormous price, he paid for them at a rate almost equally exorbitant.
There was not an article in his shop but came to him through his
Israelite providers; and