have heard that you are a professed pickpocket, and therefore I desire to have no further acquaintance with you.' The Baronet took the money with a respectful bow, and then asked his Lordship the further favour to set him down at Buckingham Gate, and without further ceremony jumped into the coach. Walpole writes to Mann, in 1750, that Jemmy Lumley last week had a party of whist at his own house: the combatants, Lucy Southwell, that curtseys like a bear, Mrs. Bijean, and Mrs. Mackenzy. They played from six in the evening till twelve next day, Jemmy never winning one rubber, and rising a loser of £2,000. . He fancied himself cheated and would not pay. However, the bear had no share in his evil surmises . . . and he promised a dinner at Hampstead to Lucy and her sister. As he went to the rendezvous his chaise was stopped, and he was advised by someone not to proceed. But proceed he did, and in the garden he found Mrs. Mackenzy. She asked him whether he was going to pay, and, on his declining to do so, the fair virago took a horsewhip from beneath her hoop, and fell upon him with the utmost vehemence.'

Members of clubs were fully aware of the nefariousness of their devotion to gambling. When a waiter at Arthur's Club was taken up for robbery, George Selwyn said: 'What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate! Certes, some of the highwaymen in that prison were not such robbers and scoundrels as some of the aristocratic members of those clubs. When, in 1750, the people got frightened about an earthquake in London, predicted to happen in that year, 'Lady Catherine Pelham,' Walpole tells us, 'Lady James Arundell, and Lord and Lady Galway

...

go this

evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are going to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back, I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish.' When the rulers of the nation on such an occasion, or any other occasion of public terror, possibly caused by their own mismanagement of public affairs, hypocritically and most impertinently ordered a day of fasting and humiliation, the gambling-houses used to be filled with officials and members of Parliament, who thus had a day off.

There was one famous gambling-house we find we have not yet mentioned, viz., Shaver's Hall, which occupied the whole of the southern side of Coventry Street, from the Haymarket to Hedge Lane (now Oxenden Street), and derived its name from the barber of Lord Pembroke, who built it out of his earnings. Attached to it was a bowling-green, which sloped down to the south. The place was built about the year 1650, and the tennis-court belonging to it till recently might still be seen in St. James's Street.

II.

WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN.

ERTAIN waves of sentiment or action, or both

CER

combined, have at various times passed over the face of European society. A thousand years ago the Old Continent went madly crusading to snatch the Holy Sepulchre from the grasp of the pagan Sultan, who, sick man as he is, still holds it. The movement had certain advantages: it cleared Europe of a good deal of ruffianism, which never came back, as it perished on the journey to Jerusalem, or very properly was killed off by the justly incensed Turks, who could not understand by what right these hordes of robbers invaded their country. Then another phase of society madness arose. Some maniac, clad in armour, on a horse similarly accoutred, would appear, and challenge everyone to admit that the Lady Gwendolyne Mousetrap, whom he kept company with, and took to the tea-gardens on Sundays, was the most peerless damosel, and that whoso doubted it, would not get off by paying a dollar, but would have to fight it out with him. Then another mailed and belted chap would jump up, and maintain that the Countess of Rabbit-Warren-who was the girl

he was just then booming-was the finest woman going, and that that slut Gwendolyne Mousetrap was no better than she should be. Of course, as soon as the King and Court heard of the shindy between the two knights a day was appointed when they should fight it out, the combatants being enclosed in a kind of rat-pit, officially called lists, whilst the King, his courtiers and their gentle ladies looked at the sport; and if one of the knights was killed, or perhaps both were killed, or at least maimed for life, the Lady Gwendolyne and the Countess of Rabbit-Warren, who, of course, both assisted at the spectacle, received the congratulations of the Court. Sometimes one of the knights would funk, and not come up to the scratch; then he was declared a lame duck, and the lady whom he had left in the lurch and made a laughing-stock of would erase his name from her tablets, and shy the trumpery proofs of devotion he had given her, a worn-out scarf or Brummagem aigrette, out of an upper window. This was called the age of chivalry. Then a totally different eruption of the fighting mania-which is, after all, the universal principle in human action-took place. A vagrant scholasticus would appear in a University town, and announce that he was ready to hold a disputation with any professor, Doctor of Divinity, or Master of Arts, on any mortal subject, the more subtle, and the more incomprehensible, and the more mystical, the better. Thus, one such scholasticus got into the rostrum at Tübingen, and addressed his audience thus: "I am about to propound three theses: the answer to the first is known to myself only, and not to you; to the second, the answer is known neither to you nor to me; to the

third, the answer is known to you only.' This was a promising programme, and, indeed, proved highly edifying. Now, the first question,' resumed the scholasticus, is this Have I got any breeches on? You don't know, but I do; I have not. The second question, the answer to which is known neither to you nor to me, is: Shall I find in this town any draper willing to advance on credit stuff enough to make me a pair? And the third question, the answer to which is known to you only, is Will any of you pay a tailor's wages to make me a pair? And now that the argument is clearly before you, we may proceed to the consideration of the parabolic triangulation of the binocular theorem;' and then he would bewilder them with a lot of jaw-breaking words, which then, as now, passed for learning. This was called the age of scholasticism. It was succeeded by the Renaissance, which, after a good boil-up of its intellectual ingredients, settled down into a literary mud, an Acqui-la-Bollente, a Nile mud, pleasant to the soul, and fertilizing to the mind, the protoplasm of diarists and letter-writers, of whom-to mention but three-Evelyn, Pepys, and Horace Walpole were prominent patterns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is with the latter, Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, we are chiefly concerned. Horace Walpole, after enlarging a cottage into a Gothic castle, with lath and plaster, and rough-cast walls, and wooden pinnacles, filled it with literary and artistic treasures. But he also gathered around him a select social circle, which included Garrick, Paul Whitehead, General Conway, George Selwyn, Richard Bentley, the poet Gray, Sir