Young fops known as “Macaroni” pranced through Pall Mall and St. James’s Street in tight britches, high heels, and oversized buttons, their hair dyed red one day and blue the next. Oxford Magazine defined the Macaroni as “a kind of animal.… It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry … it wenches without passion.” It also gambled without guilt. If London was “the devil’s drawing room,” in the phrase of author Tobias Smollett, gaming had become a diabolical national passion despite the monarch’s disapproval.
