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Letter LXIII

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2025

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Summary

I WISH to God, my dear Potts, you would come down to Edinburgh, and let me engage apartments for you at the Royal Hotel. Are you never to extend your conquests beyond London or Cardigan? Are you to lavish your captivations for ever on Bond Street milliners and blowsy Welsh-women? Why, my dear sir, your face must be as well known about St James's as the sign of the White-Horse Cellar, and your tilbury and dun gelding as familiar to the cockneys as the Lord Mayor's coach. Even Stulze himself cannot possibly disguise you as formerly. Your surtouts, your upper Benjamins, your swallow-tails, your club-coats, your orange tawny Cossacks, are now displayed without the slightest effect. It matters not whether Blake gives you the cut of the Fox, the Bear, or the Lion, whether you sport moustaches or dock your whiskers, yours is an old face upon town, and, you may rely on it, it is well known to be so. Not a girl that raises her quizzing-glass to stare at you but exclaims, “Poor Potts! how altered he must be. I have heard mamma say in her time he was good-looking; who could have believed it?” Every young Dandy that enquires your name is answered with, “Don't you know Old Potts?” “Old Potts! why, that gentleman is not old.” “No! bless your soul, he has been on town for the last twenty years.” Yet let not all this mortify you, my dear fellow, for you are not old. Six-and-thirty is a very good age, and you are still a devilish good-looking fellow. What you want is a change of scene to extend your sphere of action, to go where your face will be a new one; and, whenever you do so, you may rely on it you will never be called “Old Potts.” Now, if you will take my advice, and decide on shifting your quarters, I know of no place that would suit you half so well as Edinburgh. Your tilbury and dun gelding (though they will stand no comparison with Scrub and the shandrydan,) will cut a much greater dash in Prince's Street than in Hyde-Park; and your upper Benjamin and orange tawny Cossacks will render you a perfect Drawcansir among the ladies.

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Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk
The Text and Introduction, Notes, and Editorial Material
, pp. 426 - 432
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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