off her beautiful abundant tresses (commanding a high price from the peruke makers in those days of flowing flaxen wigs) to furnish forth a banquet for her husband's guests. Wigs were sold in that time for twenty and thirty guineas a piece; and as each fair tress fell into the trembling balances, we might suppose it to have been in every sense of the words 'worth its weight in gold.' Did such articles command an equal sum now, coiffures à la crop would shortly become fashionable amongst the poorer aristocracy; for with an upholsterer and milliner pressing hard for payment, how many a fair maiden and frisky matron would not feel inclined, like Absalom, to poll her head, and turn literally as well as poetically, each'shining tress to gold.' There is no market, we fear, now for these lovely appendages, such as that which turned the fair Howard into a merchant in hair; but it must have been a struggle with her between vanity and ambition before with shaven crown she could look on and smile, as the hungry German court fell upon the proIceeds of her wifely sacrifice, and devoured them at one fell swoop. They grew again, however, and with it the favour of the court: and on the accession of his father to the throne of England, the electoral prince (afterwards George II.) caused Mrs. Howard to be appointed woman of the bedchamber to the young Princess of Wales. Her apartments speedily became the rendezvous of all that was brilliant and distinguished in the society of the court. Amongst the men were Lord Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, and cultivating, we presume, the code of manners and morals which he afterwards recommended to the hopeless cub his son; Lord Scarborough, Lord Hervey, and General (at that time only Colonel) Lord Churchill: amongst the women we find the names which fame has made so familiar to our ears, those of Lepell, and Bellenden, and Hervey, and Walpole, and Selwyn, and Howard, -a lovely group from which death, the rude destroyer, cannot snatch the fragrance while they live in the pages of their brilliant biographer. To these apartments came frequently the electoral prince, not attracted at that time by the mild beauties of their fair mistress, but by the lovely, lively, laughing Mary Bellenden, described by every one of her contemporaries as the most perfect creature they ever knew. The fat, phlegmatic heart of her royal adorer beat strange music within the princely breast, when the sound of her footsteps fell upon his ear, Gay, almost to étourderie, the fair maid of honour was by no means equally smitten, neither was she likely to be won by his coarse, heavy gallantry, and his attentions, more persistent than acceptable. One of his amusements consisted in counting and recounting his money, a proceeding which greatly irritated the nervous system of the saucy Bellenden; 'Sir!' she cried out to him one day, 'I cannot bear it; if you count your money any more I will go out of the room.' The chink of his gold was as disagreeable to her as his unwelcome presence, and the heart of the giddy Bellenden was safe from the spells of either. That was already in the proud possession of Colonel Campbell, one of the grooms of the bedchamber, and who afterwards succeeded to the title of Argyll at the death of Duke Archibald. had promised her would-be royal lover never to marry without his privity; and having broken her word in this particular, the generous prince neither forgot nor forgave; and he never missed an opportunity of whispering some harsh reproach in her ear, when, as Mrs. Campbell, she appeared at the drawing-rooms held by the Princess of Wales. She Mrs. Howard succeeded to her friend in the post of favourite; and she had neither the wish nor the spirit to repel the attentions of her royal admirer, as Miss Bellenden had done before her. Horace Walpole tells us that she preferred the solid advantages,' to the ostentatious éclat of her position; and we have seen her exposed to defeat and humiliation by an outburst of uxoriousness on the part of the fickle lord of her affections himself. The queen had the real power, the mistress possessed but the shadow of it; but of a meek and spaniel temperament, the 'good Howard' swallowed the gilded pills offered for her occasional acceptance without a grimace. We can fancy her like the portrait given of her in these words:'Lady Suffolk was of a just height, well made, extremely fair, with the finest light-brown hair, was remarkably genteel, and always well dressed with taste and simplicity. Her face was regular and agreeable, rather than beautiful, and those charms she retained with little diminution to her death at the age of seventy-nine.' She left the court in 1735, and spent her summers at her residence of Marble Hill, Twickenham, where she became a neighbour and intimate friend of Horace Walpole's, whom she entertained with old court stories and anecdotes,' of which, in his reminiscences of the courts of George I. and George II. he made great use. She died at Marble Hill, on the 24th of July, 1767, and her last words are thus described by him, in a letter to the Earl of Strafford: 'I am very sorry that I must speak of a loss that will give you and Lady Strafford concern; an essential loss to me, who am deprived of a most agreeable friend, with whom I passed here many hours. I need not say I mean poor Lady Suffolk. I was with her two hours on Saturday night, and indeed found her much changed, though I did not apprehend her in danger. I was going to say she complained-but you know she never did complain-of the gout and rheumatism all over her, particularly in her face. It was a cold night, and she sat below stairs when she should have been in bed and I doubt this want of care was prejudicial. I sent next morning. She had had a bad night; but grew much better in the evening. Lady Dalkeith came to her, and, when she was gone, Lady Suffolk said to Lord Chetwynd, she would eat her supper in her bedchamber. He went up with her, and thought the appearances promised a good night: but she was scarce sat down in her chair, when she pressed her hand to her side, and died in half an hour.' She was extremely deaf, and Pope alludes to this infirmity in the lines he wrote upon her under the title of 'A certain Lady at Court': I know a thing that's most uncommon: I know a reasonable woman, Not warped by passion, awed by rumour; An equal mixture of good-humour "Has she no faults then," (Envy says) "sir ?" The lovely duchess, her wild Grace of Queensberry, is scarcely so often mentioned as we could wish in Mr. Walpole's letters; but here and there his pen lights upon some trait of her, in its own pointed, vivid way, and places her before us in a few sketches, given in his best style. Catherine Hyde was the daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, and afterwards became the wife of Charles Douglas, Duke of Queensberry. She was celebrated for her beauty, and for the daring with which she defied the court party, by promoting subscriptions to the second part of the 'Beggars' Opera,' when it had been prohibited from being acted. For this offence she was forbidden the court. Pope, Swift, and Prior have immortalized her in letters and in verse; the latter in the poem entitled The Female Phaeton, which, as a description of a fast young lady of those days, is worthy of insertion here: Thus Kitty, beautiful and young, Which wise mamma ordained; And visit with her cousins; And bring home hearts by dozens ! 'What has she better, pray, than I, What hidden charms to boast, That all mankind for her should die. While I am scarce a toast? ⚫ Dearest mamma, for once let me, Unchained, my fortune try: I'll have my earl as well as she, Or know the reason why. I'll soon with Jenny's pride quit score, They'll grieve I was not loosed before: She, I was loosed at all. • Fondness prevailed, mamma gave way; And set the world on fire.' The lovely duchess does not appear to have been in the good graces of Mr. Walpole, who records some of her wild pranks with a gusto which ill-nature not unfrequently gave to his pen. He thus describes a quarrel between her and the Duchess of Richmond, whose daughter, Lady Caroline, had recently eloped (as the daughters of other great houses have done in our own day), leaving their ambitious mothers open to the taunts which were winged so merrily by the lively Kitty, at the bosom of her sister duchess. "There is a very good quarrel on foot,' he writes to Sir Horace Mann, between two duchesses. She of Queensberry sent to invite Lady Emily Lennox to a ball; her Grace of Richmond, who is wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline's elopement, sent word, "she could not determine." The other sent again the same night; the same answer. The Queensberry then sent word that she had made up her company, and desired to be excused from having Lady Emily's, but at the bottom of the card wrote, "too great a trust." You know how mad she is, and how capable of such a stroke.' The next we hear of her is regaining a footing at court, a point for which she had intrigued two years unsuccessfully, and which she achieved on the occasion of her son's being obliged to the king for a regiment in the Dutch service. She would not let him go to kiss hands until they sent for her too. Then, again, we find her at Richmond, at a firework fête, amongst the whole court of St. Germain's and all the Fitzes upon earth,' in ⚫ a forlorn trim, in white apron and hood,' which it was her whim to assume on that occasion, making the duke swallow all her undress.' 'Tother day,' Mr. Walpole goes on to inform his correspondent, in this instance George Montagu, Esq., to whom many of his most amusing and gossiping letters were addressed, she drove post to Lady Sophia Thomas, of Parson's Green, and told her that she was come to tell her something of importance. "What is it?" "Why, take a couple of beefsteaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling, and eat them with pepper and salt; it's the best thing you ever tasted; I could not help coming to tell you this;" and away she drove back to town. Don't a course of folly for forty years,' he adds, with some justice, 'make one very sick?' Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the learned luminaries of Horace Walpole's day, and comes decidedly under the head of the witty, if not of the pretty women of her time. The picture given of her at Florence, where she formed the centre of a literary coterie, and was herself a laughing-stock to the fashionable triflers who outwardly courted her, is far from a pleasing one; and no fair savante perhaps ever aroused more bitterness of feeling amongst the literary men of her day than did Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by the wanton shafts of her coarse and relentless tongue. One of her few admirers, Spence, indeed, said of her: 'She is one of the most shining characters in the world, but shines like a comet; she is all irregularity, and always wandering; the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, most disagreeable; best-natured, cruellest woman in the world; all things by turn and nothing long.' Walpole's picture of her is a less pleasing one, but he entertained a strong prejudice against her, and writes as follows to Mr. H. S. Conway, from Florence, where he diverted himself, in September, 1740, with operas, concerts, balls, and a continual round of pleasures, which he did not forget to describe, although he pronounces himself unfitted to carry on a correspondence with anybody in England, owing to his being so utterly a stranger to everything going on there, and to the on dits and bon mots then current on the surface of London society. 'Did I tell you,' he says, 'that Lady Mary Wortley is here? She laughs at my Lady Walpole, scolds my Lady Pomfret, and is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, and partly covered with white paint which, for cheapness, she has bought so coarse, that you would not use it to wash a chimney.' Not a tempting picture of the bas bleu of the period, and a warning to those fair ones, ambitious of the bays of literature, not to despise the most powerful gift which nature ever bestows upon them, and while they cultivate the graces of the mind to bestow as well their best attention upon those of the person. Lady Mary, by birth a Pierrepoint, was the eldest daughter of Evelyn, Earl of Kingston, by his wife the Lady Mary Feilding, daughter of William, Earl of Denbigh, and she was born at Thoresby, in Nottinghamshire, in the year of our Lord 1690, so that she must have been fifty years old when Horace Walpole penned this satirical sketch in 1740. No traces left, according to him, of the great personal attractions, which, in addition to unusual sprightliness of mind, distinguished her more youthful days. She was a voluminous and satirical writer, but the coarseness of her style renders her works unreadable in this more discriminating age; and the inost notable incident in her life is her mysterious quarrel with Pope, the virus of whose crippled nature Je turned upon one, whom in the days of their friendship he had thus flatteringly described: The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth, Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe, With greatness easy, and with wit sincere; With just description show the soul divine, And the whole princess in my work should shine.' Alas! for the constancy of poets and men, the adulation of these lines is swept away from the mind in the tornado of brutal sarcasm, in which Pope afterwards vilifies the name of his former mistress, in his 'Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace.' They were both of them good haters, and proficients in the art of abuse. But if Pope's nature had not been as deformed as his person, he could not have thus defamed the woman who had once reigned paramount in his heart. How different an account does Mr. Walpole give of his fair French friend, Madame du Deffand, of whose sentiment for himself, however, he became eventually rather ashamed. She had been a celebrated leader of French society, but Walpole did not become acquainted with her until she was far advanced in life, and was quite blind. His biographer, Lord Dover, says: 'Her devotion for him appears to have been very great, and is sometimes expressed in her letters with a warmth and a tenderness which Walpole, who was most sensitive of ridicule' (what satirist is not so?), 'thought so absurd, in a person of her years and infirmities, that he frequently reproves her very harshly for it; so much so, as to give him an appearance of a want of kindly feeling towards her, which his general conduct to her, and the regrets he expressed on her death, do not warrant us in accusing him of.' His description of her in Paris, in 1769, is amusing, and does not evince the sensitive shrinking from undue demonstration on the part of his elderly love, which, at other times, his vanity caused. My dear old woman is in better health than I left her, and her spirits so increased, that I tell her she will go mad with age. When they ask her how old she is, she answers, "J'ai soixante et mille ans." She and I went to the Boulevard last night after supper, and drove about there till two in the morning. We are going to sup in the country this evening, and are to go to-morrow night at eleven to the puppet-show. Feeling in herself no difference between the spirits of twenty-three and seventythree, she thinks there is no impediment to doing whatever one will, but the want of eyesight. If she had that, I am persuaded no consideration would prevent her making me a visit at Strawberry Hill.' Upon this fact there can be but little doubt but that the wily old bachelor secretly congratulated himself. 'She makes songs, sings them, remembers all that ever were made; and having lived from the most agreeable to the most reasoning age, has all that was amiable in the last, and all that is sensible in this, without the vanity of the former, or the pedant impertinence of the latter. I have heard her dispute with all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects, and never knew her in the wrong. She humbles the learned, sets right their disciples, and finds conversation for everybody. Affectionate as Madame de Sevigné, she has none of her prejudices, but a more universal taste; and with the most delicate frame, her spirits hurry her through a life of fatigue, that would kill me if I was to continue here. If we return by one in the morning, from suppers in the country, she proposes driving to the Boulevard or to the Loire St. Bride, because it is too early to go to bed. I had great difficulty last night to persuade her, though she was not well, not to sit up till between two and three for the comet; for which purpose she had appointed an astronomer to bring his telescopes to the President Henault's, as she thought it would amuse me.' To us individually, this picture of Horace Walpole's 'dear old woman' is a ghastly one. This singing, gadding, disputing, driving, star-gazing, blind old French woman, is to us the picture of an elderly enfant terrible, whom we would rather meet with in description than in real life. The antics of the kitten suit ill, it appears to us, with the infirmities of age; and had Madame du Deffand been less infatuated upon Horace Walpole himself, we can imagine that the most trenchant sallies of his bitter wit would have been directed at her senile étourderies. We read of her four years later flying to his side the moment he arrived, and remaining with him while he made his toilette, remarking, with truly French modesty, that her want of sight made such a defiance of the usual conventional observances proper for her. He amusingly relates, on the occasion of this visit, the démélés he had to raccomode, and the mémoires to present against Touton, Madame du Deffand's favourite dog: 'As I am the only person,' he says, 'who dare correct him, I have already insisted on his being confined in the Bastille every day after five o'clock. T'other night he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought would have torn her eye out; but it ended in biting her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not beaten Touton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady, whose dog having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, "Won't it make my dog sick?” › Five years after this visit of Mr. Walpole's to Paris, on September 27th, 1780, we find the chronicle of this frisky old lady's demise: 'I have lost my dear old friend Madame du Deffand. She was indeed near eighty-four, but retained all her faculties. Two days ago the letters from Paris forbade all hopes. So I reckon myself as dead to France, where I have kept up no other connexion.' 'Touton,' the spoilt little favourite, was sent to Strawberry, a legacy to Mr. Walpole, whose promise Madame du Deffand had obtained to take care of the dog should it survive its doatingly attached mistress. In answer to a letter from the former to the Rev. Mr. Cole, the worthy antiquary remarks: 'I congratulate the little Parisian dog that he has fallen into the hands of so humane a master. I have a little |