If you want a window on a man’s soul, or at the very least his inner elegance, sling him a monocle and ask him to screw it into his eye-socket.

You’ll be surprised at the result. So surprised, in fact, that you will start inking eyeglasses onto photos of your friends and enemies, the better to understand their real characters.

It’s too simple to dismiss the monocle-wearer as a chinless fop or a grouchy old reactionary. Besides, Patrick Moore doesn’t look ridiculous because he’s wearing a monocle, but because he seems to have a weird habit of combing his eyebrow over the top of it. Either that or he goes to bed wearing the thing, which rather misses the point.

The monocle developed from the dandy’s quizzing glass. Looking at someone through a ‘quizzer’ was known as ‘quizzing’, defined rather ably by Thomas Wright in his 1865 Royal Dictionary Cyclopedia of Universal Reference as

The act of mocking by a narrow examination through a quizzing-glass or by pretended seriousness of discourse.

The best quizzer of the lot was Old Q, 4th Duke of Queensberry, seen here “Quiz-zing a Filly” whilst playing with something in his trousers.

For the quizzing glass or the monocle to work properly, you have to maintain a near-indefinable aura of mockery. That way lies elegance. If you don’t and - worse - you take yourself seriously, the eyeglass becomes a little window through which people stare at you whilst laughing, pointing and (depending on the sort of company you keep) dropping their breeches.

J.A.M. Whistler, above, had no such trouble. If memory serves me well, and the person who told me the story wasn’t lying, Whistler not only had monocle-wearing in his blood, but he used to wear watch-glasses instead of the proper optical instrument. It was even more disconcerting. If you bored the man, he was likely to lift his eyebrow and let the watch-glass smash on the floor. As you stammered, he would nonchalently draw another from his pocket and screw it in his eye socket.

Bravo. Other people didn’t quite understand this incredible finesse, as you can see:

It’s not hard to spot the problem, is it? The fellow took himself far too seriously. As a result, we laugh at him for being the sort of man who owns two copies - but has never read - Marius the Epicurian. We chuckle because we can look through his eyeglass and into his soul, where we learn to our distaste that he clips his toenails every Monday evening before sallying forth to seduce stormtroopers.*

Anyway, he had no excuse. Rupert Ingalese published his Juggling as early as 1921. No monocle wearer from that point on had any excuse not to be adept at the Eyeglass Trick, as here illustrated.

Elegance in its purest form. When done properly, the monocle is stylish, witty, pleasing to the eye, and ever so slightly disarming. And lest anyone thought the prop was the preserve of the gentlemen, here’s one for the ladies:

Incomparable. Screw one in today.

*In-joke. Skip it or ask Dornan for a gloss.