the excited crew generally finished by breakfasting at daylight on the remains of the supper, and then going home "gloriously drunk." At Cornelys' masquerades in Soho-square, after a supper, marked by hard drinking and immodest singing, "which no lady need leave save those who are too immodest to stay," as the formula ran, the custom was to fling open the windows and pelt the eager, hungry, thirsty, and howling crowd below with half-empty bottles and the remains of the supper. The very Queen of Beauty at these orgies was young Gertrude Conway, niece of General Conway, daughter of Francis, first Marquis of Hertford, and only just married to George Villiers Earl of Grandison. She was the Queen of Fashion as well as of Beauty; and she excited the greatest admiration by giving frocks and tambour-waistcoats, as undress livery to her servants; and by the splendour of her chairmen, who never carried her abroad without feathers in their hats. This gay young wife died in 1782, in the thirty-second year of her age. In her masquerades lost their great patroness. This species of entertainment was never encouraged by George III., at whose request Foote abstained from giving a masquerade at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. There were some curious scruples entertained even by people of pleasure at this time. The most fashionable of them appeared at the theatre in Lent attired in mourning; and at the same season masquerades were considered as out of place; but these scrupulous persons found a method of reconciling their sense of religion with their taste for dissipation : "In Lent, if masquerades displease the town, Madame Teresa Cornelys, a German by birth, and by profession a public singer, was one of the entrepreneurs of masquerades. Walpole describes her as a singular dame, and "the Heidegger of the age." She took Carlisle House, on the east side of Soho-square, enlarged it, and established here assemblies and balls by subscription. At first they scandalized, but soon drew in both righteous and ungodly. She went on building, and made her house a fairy palace for balls, concerts, and masquerades. Her opera, which she called "Harmonic Meetings," was splendid and charming. To avoid the Act, she pretended to take no money, and had the assur ance to advertise that the subscription was to provide coats for the poor, for she vehemently courted the mob, and gained their favour. She then declared her masquerades were for the benefit of commerce. At last the bench of magistrates decided against her, and she was compelled to shut up the house. Her improvidence then reduced her to become a "vendor of asses' milk" at Knightsbridge; but she sank still lower, and died in 1797, in the Fleet Prison. VAILS TO SERVANTS. The giving of vails to servants was carried to great excess in the last century. Dr. King tells of a Lord Poor, a Roman Catholic peer of Ireland, who lived upon a small pension which Queen Anne had granted him. The Duke of Ormonde often invited him to dinner, and he as often excused himself. At last the duke kindly expostulated with him, and would know the reason why he so constantly refused to be one of his guests. My Lord Poor then honestly confessed that he could not afford it; "but," said he, "if your Grace will put a guinea into my hands as often as you are pleased to invite me to dine, I will not decline the honour of waiting on you." This was done, and Lord Poor was afterwards a frequent guest at the Duke's, in St. James's-square. Lord Taaffe, of Ireland, a general officer in the Austrian service, who resided for a time in England, had another way of meeting this subject of vails. When his friends, who had dined with him, were going away, he always attended them to the door; and if they offered any money to the servant who opened it (for he never suffered but one servant to appear), he always prevented them, saying, in his manner of speaking English, "If you do give it, give it to me, for it was I that did buy the dinner." It was at Newcastle House, at the north-west angle of Lincoln's Inn Fields, then the residence of the Duke of Newcastle, that the old and expensive custom of "vailsgiving" received its death-blow. Sir Timothy Waldo, on his way from the Duke's dinner-table to his carriage, put a crown into the hand of the cook, who returned it, saying, 66 Sir, I do not take silver." "Don't you, indeed?" said Sir Timothy, putting the crown into his pocket; "then I do not give gold." Jonas Hanway's "Eight Letters to the Duke of" had their origin in Sir Timothy's complaint. AMENITIES OF SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH. One of her Grace's principal charms was a prodigious abundance of fine hair; one day, at her toilet, in anger to her heroic lord, she cut off her commanding tresses, and flung them in his face. Her eldest daughter and she were long at variance, and never reconciled. When the younger Duchess exposed herself by placing a monument and silly epitaph of her own composition and bad spelling, to Congreve, in Westminster Abbey, her mother, quoting the words, said, "I know not what happiness she might have in his company, but I am sure it was no honour." With her youngest daughter, the Duchess of Montagu, old Sarah agreed as ill. "I wonder," said the Duke of Marlborough to them, "that you cannot agree, you are so alike!" Of her grand-daughter, the Duchess of Manchester, she affected to be fond. One day, she said to her, "Duchess of Manchester, you are a good creature, and I love you mightily-but you have a mother!" "And she has a mother!" answered the Duchess of Manchester, who was all spirit, justice, and honour, and could not suppress sudden truth. Sarah, who had risen to greatness and independent wealth by the weakness of a Queen, forgot, like the Duke d'Epernon, her own unmerited exaltation, and affected to brave successive courts, though sprung from the dregs of one. When the Prince of Orange came over, in 1734, to marry the Princess Royal Anne, a boarded gallery, with a penthouse roof, was erected for the procession from the windows of the great drawing-room at St. James's across the garden to the Lutheran Chapel in the Friary. The marriage was deferred for some weeks, and the boarded gallery remained, darkening the windows of Marlborough House. The Duchess cried, "I wonder when my neighbour George will take away his orangechest!"—which the gallery did resemble. Great was her fury when Henry Fox prevailed on the second Duke to go over to the court. With her warm, intemperate, humour, she said, "That was the Fox that had stolen her goose! Repeated injuries at last drove the Duke to go to law with her, fearing that even no lawyer would come up to the Billingsgate with which she was animated herself. She appeared in the court of justice, and with some wit and infinite abuse, treated the laughing public with the spectacle of a woman who had held the reins of empire, metamorphosed into the widow Blackacre. Her grandson, in his suit, demanded a sword set with diamonds, given to his grandsire by the Emperor. "I retained it," said the beldam, "lest he should pick out the diamonds and pawn them." Her insolent asperity once produced an admirable reply from the famous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lady Sundon had received a pair of diamond ear-rings as a bribe for procuring a considerable post in Queen Caroline's family for a certain peer; and decked with those jewels, paid a visit to the old Duchess ; who, as soon as she was gone, said, “What an impudent creature to come hither with the bribe in her ear!" Madam," replied Lady Mary Wortley, who was present, "how should people know where wine is sold, unless a bush is hung out." 66 Eventually, the Duke resigned everything to reinstate himself in the old Duchess' will, when she said, "It is very natural; he listed as soldiers do when they are drunk, and repented when he was sober." Sarah, in a letter to Lord Stair, says, "I have made a settlement of a very great estate that is in my own power, upon my grandson, John Spencer, and his sons; but they are to forfeit it if any of them shall ever accept any employment military or civil, or any pension from any King or Queen of this realm, and the estate is to go to others in the entail. This, I think, ought to please everybody; for it will secure my heirs in being very considerable men. None of them can put on a fool's coat, and take posts from soldiers of experience and service, who never did anything but kill pheasants and partridges." With this said will, her son-in-law, the Duke of Montagu, had bound up an old penny history-book, called "The Old Woman's Will of Ratcliffe Highway," only tearing away the title-page of the latter. FINE COURTESY. On one of George the First's journeys to Hanover, his coach broke. At a distance in view was a château of a considerable German nobleman. The King sent to borrow assistance. The possessor came, conveyed the King to his house, and begged the honour of his Majesty accepting a dinner while his carriage was repairing; and while the dinner was preparing, begged leave to amuse his Majesty with a collection of pictures, which he had formed in several tours to Italy. But what did the King see in one of the rooms but an unknown portrait of a person in the robes and with the regalia of the sovereigns of Great Britain! George asked whom it represented. The nobleman replied, with much diffident but decent respect, that in various journeys to Rome he had become acquainted with the Chevalier de St. George, who had done him the honour of sending him that picture. "Upon my word," said the King instantly, "it is very like to the family." It was impossible to remove the embarrassment of the proprietor with more good breeding.-Walpole's Reminiscences. FLATTERING COMPARISON. When Prince William (afterwards Duke of Cumberland) was a child, he was carried to his grandfather on his birthday, when the King asked him at what hour he rose. The Prince replied, "When the chimney-sweepers went about.""Vat is de chimney-sweeper?" said the King. "Have you been so long in England," said the boy, "and do you not know what a chimney-sweeper is? Why, they are like that man there; pointing to Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Winchelsea and Nottingham, of a family uncommonly dark and swarthy"the black funereal Finches." THE HUSBAND'S ADVICE. Sir John Germain, a short time before his decease, in 1718, having called his wife to his bedside, said: "Lady Betty, I have made you a very indifferent husband, and particularly of late years, when infirmities have rendered me a burden to myself; but I shall not be much longer troublesome to you. I advise you never again to marry an old man ; but I strenuously exhort you to marry when I am gone, and I will endeavour to put it in your power. You have fulfilled every obligation towards me in an exemplary manner, and I wish to demonstrate my sense of your merits. I have, therefore, by my will, bequeathed you this estate,* which I received from * Drayton, in Northamptonshire, "a most venerable heap of ugliness, with many curious bits.""-Walpole. |