HAT a bevy of fair women the

Wold showman has still to

exhibit to us, before we shall have owned the penny fairly earned, and feel inclined to cry Hold, enough!'

"Ah! the matrons of those days were "frisky" enough in all conscience!' observed a lady to us the other day, when the above-mentioned pretty and witty women,' immortalized by the pen of Horace Walpole, came under discussion between us.

She was one of the class of 'young matrons,' upon whom an ungallant Saturday Reviewer has exercised his pungent satire; and as one of the prettiest and perhaps the friskiest amongst them, she naturally resented his unchivalric strictures upon the proper boundaries of matronly de

corum.

'But then,' she added, with a dash of bitterness, in the most dulcet tones in the world, we have no Horace Walpole to hand us down in glowing colours to posterity, or to prattle pleasantly to our greatgreat-granddaughters, about the 'kingdom of beauty as it existed in his day. We have to sit and be lectured by one who tattles to us of "followers," and accuses us of playing "high jinks;" I appeal to you, sir, as to what that refined recreation might be? and also, as to whether the description of it comes well from the lips of a mentor who accuses us of slang? Horace Walpole, better than most men, understood the structure and the requirements of society,-he knew, that it cannot be built without corner-stones, and that the Utopia in which young-ladyism would (according to our Saturday Reviewer) reign supreme, would be a "Paradise of Fools." Why has French society ever been the most brilliant in the world? Why but because married women-young, beautiful, witty married women, there assume the position that of right belongs to them, and lead society

in a silken chain. Young ladies,. single, as well as married, have liberty enough, one would imagine, in these days, to satisfy the mind of the most sanguine republican; and our critic forgets that with the raw recruits of "fast young ladies," the ranks of the "frisky matrons" are filled up. 'High jinks," indeed!"

The last words were accompanied by the slightest upward elevation of the most delicately chiselled nose in the world,-a nose, to which the gallant old bachelor would, had he seen it, have vowed everlasting allegiance.

'His love-his duty-his jealousy' would have been all and each at the service of a countess, as lovely as that one with whom all those who linger over his attractive pages are already so familiar: the lovely, arch, fascinating Lady Coventry, whose short but brilliant career is brought so graphically before us, that we follow it in our mind's eye, step by step, until we feel as though we had lost a living thing, when the exit of the fairest performer on the mimic stage is announced thus: —‘The charming countess is dead at last.'

He writes to Sir Horace Mann, from Arlington Street, October the 5th, 1760; and that at last' is full of melancholy interest to us, who have had glimpses of her, here and there, bright, beautiful, dying, the first and most admirable figure in those brilliant circles, which she was so well fitted by nature to adorn.

At the trial of that ill-favoured Lord Ferrers, the only redeeming incident in whose life was the courage of his departure from it, we read that, 'to the amazement of everybody, Lady Coventry was there; and looking as well as ever.' 'I sat next but one to her,' says Mr. Walpole, and should not have asked if she had been ill: yet they are positive she has few weeks to live. She and Lord Bolingbroke

had other thoughts, and were acting over all the old comedy of eyes.'

Fair, frisky matron, she! flirting, on the very margin of her grave.

Her early death was in a great measure to be attributed to the inveterate use of white paint; a practice to which the beauties of that day were much, and as in this case sometimes fatally addicted.

So much has been written in a former number of 'London Society,' with regard to this beautiful woman, that it would be mere repetition on our part to relate the leading incidents in her short life, (she was but six-and-twenty when she died), with which Horace Walpole, and other gossiping authorities of the day, have made us acquainted. She was wild, arch, espiègle, rather than witty; and her beauty, and that of her sister Gunning (the Duchess of Hamilton by her first marriage, Argyle, by the second), was the wonder of an admiring world.

The features of this last were, we are told, never so beautiful as Lady Coventry's; and at one time it was believed that the fatal seal of consumption was set upon her, and she is spoken of as a 'wreck and a remain.' This was about the time of Lady Coventry's death, who was the elder of the two celebrated sisters, consequently the Duchess of Hamilton could have been but five-and-twenty at the time. It is possible that she also might have indulged in the fatal habit so fashionable then, and that, warned by the fate of her sister, she desisted from the practice, for we find her mentioned long afterwards as in full possession of her former beauty.

There can be no doubt but that the success and celebrity of these two remarkable women was owing, in part, to the gallantry of a beautyworshipping age, and to the more condensed state of society (London society, I mean) as it existed in those days.

It was but a pocket edition of the London society of our own. They had one set where we have ten; and the sayings and doings, and personal characteristics of the magnates in that set, were commented on and recorded with a minute

fidelity of description, which makes those who are but outsiders feel more at home with the wits and beauties of a day gone by, than with the wits and beauties who live, and breathe, and revolve in their respective orbits in our own. What was formerly a lake is now the open sea, stretching far away to the faint horizon, and in which individuality and identity are completely lost. The great reigning beauties who dazzled their respective adherents in town, this season, were not the toasts, neither were their sayings and doings (however witty or however remarkable) the admiration and wonder of the age. Unmolested, now, might the two fair Gunnings in the flesh, parade every part of London, without being followed by a gaping crowd. The two Irish girls of no fortune,' but who were declared to be 'the handsomest women alive,' would not now we fear turn the heads of fashionable crowds, or distract the attention of politicians on the eve of a ministerial crisis. But in Horace Walpole's time, when these two sisters walked in the Park, or went to Vauxhall, such mobs followed them that they had generally to be driven away;' and Lady Coventry once asked and obtained from the king a guard of honour to escort her in safety through the thronging crowds of thegreat unwashed,' who congregated to gaze upon her when she took her walks abroad.'

Whether or no this royal escort was likely to detract from the 'sensation' attending them, or whether it was the wish of the fair Countess herself that it should do so, is a point that we leave to the penetration of our fairer readers to determine. Gallantry forbids us to pry too closely into the hidden motives of the beautiful creatures with whose gem-like radiance we wish to enliven our pages.

It was a wild wedding, that of the younger and, according to Walpole, least handsome of the two sisters, with the extravagant, dissipated Duke of Hamilton, 'equally damaged in his fortune and person,' who fell in love with her at a masquerade, and determined to marry her in

the spring. Becoming, however, more desperately enamoured than ever, after an evening spent in the society of the sisters and their mother, at Bedford House, he would wait for neither license nor ring; but after, with some difficulty, satisfying the scruples of the parson called upon to celebrate the extempore ceremony, they were married with the ring of a bed-curtain, at half-an-hour after twelve at night at Mayfair Chapel.

The women,' of course, 'were furious;' more especially so, as Lord Coventry, a 'grave young lord, of the remains of the patriot breed,' declared that he would follow the example of his brother peer, and marry the other at once.

He could scarcely, indeed, hesitate on the score of a mésalliance, in following in the steps of one who is described as being in his own person' the abstract of Scotch pride.' He and his newly-married duchess, 'at their own house, walked into dinner before their company, sat together at the upper end of their own table, ate off the same plate, and drank to nobody under the rank of earl.'

If the daughters who, like the two Miss Gunnings, had made their début that year in the fashionable circles of London, hated the beauties themselves, what vials of dowager wrath we can imagine to have been upturned upon the devoted head of the fortunate Mrs. Gunning, the successful, speculating mother of those days! Two beautiful hoyden daughters, in the zenith of their first season, about to be allied in marriage to two of the noblest houses that England and Scotland could boast!-the seal of the most brilliant success thus being set upon their scarcely ripened charms.

It was what the fast maiden of our own day, in language more expressive than elegant, would call an awfully lucky coup,' and one which the modern Belgravian mother, with many more advantages to boast, might well be proud to achieve.

The Duke of Hamilton dying in 1758, six years after the strange

nuptial ceremony in Mayfair Chapel, his widow soon consoled herself for his loss. In the following year, Mr. Walpole tells us that Jack Campbell (afterwards Duke of Argyle) and the Duchess of Hamilton had exchanged hearts; and he goes on to say, 'It is the prettiest match in the world, and every body likes it but the Duke of Bridgewater and Lord Coventry. What

an extraordinary fate is attached to these two women! Who would have believed that a Gunning would unite the two great houses of Campbell and Hamilton? For my part, I expect to see my Lady Coventry Queen of Prussia. I would not venture to marry either of them, for these thirty years, for fear of being shuffled out of the world prematurely, to make room for the rest of their adventures.'

Extraordinary, indeed, that before the death of the young countess, which melancholy event occurred so early in her married life, her younger sister, inferior to herself in beauty, and without, perhaps, the peculiar charm of manner which made every one her slave, had been twice a wife-the first time to an actual duke; the second, to a duke to-be.

If the reader is anxious to see an authentic likeness of this celebrated woman, and at the same time to enjoy a cool and pleasant lounge amongst the beauties of bygone day, he might effect both purposes by visiting the Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures on loan at the South Kensington Museum. No. 1846 on the wall, there is a miniature-portrait of 'Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton, and afterwards of Argyle. This lady and her sister,' we read in the catalogue-for which we paid the exorbitant sum of five shillings!-' were the beautiful Miss Gunnings of Horace Walpole.' But we sought in vain for a portrait of that equally famous sister, Maria, Countess of Coventry.

As Duchess of Hamilton still, although the wife of Jack Campbell,' not yet arrived at the proud title of Duke of Argyle, we find her playing her part at the coronation