Descend from fool to fool.

Satire was, indeed, quite as rough in prose as it was sharp in song. One of the boldest paragraphs ever penned by paragraph writers of the time appeared in the ‘Public Advertiser’ in the summer of 1773. A statue of the King had been erected in Berkeley Square. The discovery was soon made that the King himself had paid for it. Accordingly, the ‘Public Advertiser’ audaciously informed him that he had paid for his statue, because he well knew that none would ever be spontaneously erected in his honour by posterity. The ‘Advertiser’ further advised George III. to build his own mausoleum for the same reason.

And what were ‘the quality’ about in 1773? There was Lord Hertford exclaiming, ‘By Jove!’ because he objected to swearing. Ladies were dancing ‘Cossack’ dances, and gentlemen figured at balls in black coats, red waistcoats, and red sashes, or quadrilled with nymphs in white satin—themselves radiant in brown silk coat, with cherry-coloured waistcoat and breeches. Beaux who could not dance took to cards, and the Duke of Northumberland lost two thousand pounds at quince before half a dancing night had come to an end. There was Sir John Dalrymple winning money more disastrously than the duke lost it. He was a man who inveighed against corruption, and who took bribes from brewers. Costume balls were in favour at court, Chesterfield was making jokes to the very door of his coffin; and he was not the only patron of the arts who bought a Claude Lorraine painted within the preceding half-year. The macaronies, having left off gaming—they had lost all their money—astonished the town by their new dresses and the size of their nosegays. Poor George III. could not look admiringly at the beautiful Miss Linley at an oratorio, without being accused of ogling her. It was at one of the King’s balls that Mrs. Hobart figured, ‘all gauze and spangles, like a spangle pudding.’ This was the expensive year when noblemen are said to have made romances instead of giving balls. The interiors of their mansions were transformed, walls were cast down, new rooms were built, the decorations were superb (three hundred pounds was the sum asked only for the loan of mirrors for a single night), and not only were the dancers in the most gorgeous of historical or fancy costumes, but the musicians wore scarlet robes, and looked like Venetian senators on the stage. It was at one of these balls that Harry Conway was so astonished at the agility of Mrs. Hobart’s bulk that he said he was sure she must be hollow.

She would not have been more effeminate than some of our young legislators in the Commons, who, one night in May, ‘because the House was very hot, and the young members thought it would melt their rouge and wither their nosegays,’ as Walpole says, all of a sudden voted against their own previously formed opinions. India and Lord Clive were the subjects, and the letter-writer remarks that the Commons ‘being so fickle, Lord Clive has reason to hope that after they have voted his head off they will vote it on again the day after he has lost it.’

When there were members in the Commons who rouged like pert girls or old women, and carried nosegays as huge as a lady mayoress’s at a City ball, we are not surprised to hear of macaronies in Kensington Gardens. There they ran races on every Sunday evening, ‘to the high amusement and contempt of the mob,’ says Walpole. The mob had to look at the runners from outside the gardens. ‘They will be ambitious of being fashionable, and will run races too.’ Neither mob nor macaronies had the swiftness of foot or the lasting powers of some of the running footmen attached to noble houses. Dukes would run matches of their footmen from London to York, and a fellow has been known to die rather than that ‘his grace’ who owned him should lose the match. Talking of ‘graces,’ an incident is told by Walpole of the cost of a bed for a night’s sleep for a duchess, which may well excite a little wonder now. The king and court were at Portsmouth to review the fleet. The town held so many more visitors than it could accommodate that the richest of course secured the accommodation. ‘The Duchess of Northumberland gives forty guineas for a bed, and must take her chambermaid into it.’ Walpole, who is writing to the Countess of Ossory, adds: ‘I did not think she would pay so dear for such company.’ The people who were unable to pay ran recklessly into debt, and no more thought of the sufferings of those to whom they owed the money than that modern rascalry in clean linen, who compound with their creditors and scarcely think of paying their ‘composition.’ A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the virtues of Charles James Fox, who had none but such as may be found in easy temper and self-indulgence. He was now in debt to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. But so once was Julius Cæsar, with whom Walpole satirically compared him. He let his securities, his bondsmen, pay the money which they had warranted would be forthcoming from him, ‘while he, as like Brutus as Cæsar, is indifferent about such paltry counters.’ When one sees the vulgar people who by some means or other, and generally by any means, accumulate fortunes the sum total of which would once have seemed fabulous, and when we see fortunes of old aristocratic families squandered away among the villains of the most villainous ‘turf,’ there is nothing strange in what we read in a letter of a hundred years ago, namely: ‘What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth! filled by nabobs and emptied by macaronies; a country over-run by horse-races.’ So London at the end of July now is not unlike to London of 1773; but we could not match the latter with such a street picture as the following: ‘There is scarce a soul in London but macaronies lolling out of windows at Almack’s, like carpets to be dusted.’ With the more modern parts of material London Walpole was ill satisfied. We look upon Adam’s work with some complacency, but Walpole exclaims, ‘What are the Adelphi buildings?’ and he replies, ‘Warehouses laced down the seams, like a soldier’s trull in a regimental old coat!’ Mason could not bear the building brothers. ‘Was there ever such a brace,’ he asks, ‘of self-puffing Scotch coxcombs?’ The coxcombical vein was, nevertheless, rather the fashionable one. Fancy a nobleman’s postillions in white jackets trimmed with muslin, and clean ones every other day! In such guise were Lord Egmont’s postillions to be seen.

The chronicle of fashion is dazzling with the record of the doings of the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. At her house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, were held the assemblies which were scornfully called ‘blue-stocking’ by those who were not invited, or who affected not to care for them if they were. Mrs. Delany, who certainly had a great regard for this ‘lady of the last century,’ has a sly hit at Mrs. Montagu in a letter of May 1773. ‘If,’ she writes, ‘I had paper and time, I could entertain you with Mrs. Montagu’s room of Cupidons, which was opened with an assembly for all the foreigners, the literati, and the macaronies of the present age. Many and sly are the observations how such a genius, at her age and so circumstanced, could think of painting the walls of her dressing-room with bowers of roses and jessamine, entirely inhabited by little Cupids in all their little wanton ways. It is astonishing, unless she looks upon herself as the wife of old Vulcan, and mother to all those little Loves!’ This is a sister woman’s testimony of a friend! The genius of Mrs. Montagu was of a higher class than that of dull but good Mrs. Delany. The age of the same lady was a little over fifty, when she might fittingly queen it, as she did, in her splendid mansion in Hill Street, the scene of the glories of her best days. The ‘circumstances’ and the ‘Vulcan’ were allusions to her being the wife of a noble owner of collieries and a celebrated mathematician, who suffered from continued ill-health, and who considerately went to bed at five o’clock P.M. daily!

The great subject of the year, after all, was the duping of Charles Fox, by the impostor who called herself the Hon. Mrs. Grieve. She had been transported, and after her return had set up as ‘a sensible woman,’ giving advice to fools, ‘for a consideration.’ A silly Quaker brought her before Justice Fielding for having defrauded him. He had paid her money, for which she had undertaken to get him a place under government; but she had kept the money, and had not procured for him the coveted place. Her impudent defence was that the Quaker’s immorality stood in the way of otherwise certain success. The Honourable lady’s dupes believed in her, because they saw the style in which she lived, and often beheld her descend from her chariot and enter the houses of ministers and other great personages; but it came out that she only spoke to the porters or to other servants, who entertained her idle questions, for a gratuity, while Mrs. Grieve’s carriage, and various dupes, waited for her in the street. When these dupes, however, saw Charles Fox’s chariot at Mrs. Grieve’s door, and that gentleman himself entering the house—not issuing therefrom till a considerable period had elapsed—they were confirmed in their credulity. But the clever hussey was deluding the popular tribune in the house, and keeping his chariot at her door, to further delude the idiots who were taken in by it. The patriot was in a rather common condition of patriots; he was over head and ears in debt. The lady had undertaken to procure for him the hand of a West Indian heiress, a Miss Phipps, with 80,000l., a sum that might soften the hearts of his creditors for a while. The young lady (whom ‘the Hon.’ never saw) was described as a little capricious. She could not abide dark men, and the swart democratic leader powdered his eyebrows that he might look fairer in the eyes of the lady of his hopes. An interview between them was always on the point of happening, but was always being deferred. Miss Phipps was ill, was coy, was not ‘i’ the vein’; finally she had the smallpox, which was as imaginary as the other grounds of excuse. Meanwhile Mrs. Grieve lent the impecunious legislator money, 300l. or thereabouts. She was well paid, not by Fox, of course, but by the more vulgar dupes who came to false conclusions when they beheld his carriage, day after day, at the Hon. Mrs. Grieve’s door. The late Lord Holland expressed his belief that the loan from Mrs. Grieve was a foolish and improbable story. ‘I have heard Fox say,’ Lord Holland remarks in the ‘Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,’ edited by Lord John (afterwards Earl) Russell, ‘she never got or asked any money from him.’ She probably knew very well that Fox had none to lend. That he should have accepted any from such a woman is disgraceful enough: but there may be exaggeration in the matter.

Fox—it is due to him to note the fact here—had yet hardly begun seriously and earnestly his career as a public man. At the close of 1773 he was sowing his wild oats. He ended the year with the study of two widely different dramatic parts, which he was to act on a private stage. Those parts were Lothario, in ‘The Fair Penitent,’ and Sir Harry’s servant, in ‘High Life below Stairs.’ The stage on which the two pieces were acted, by men scarcely inferior to Fox himself in rank and ability, was at Winterslow House, near Salisbury, the seat of the Hon. Stephen Fox. The night of representation closed the Christmas holidays of 1773-4. It was Saturday, January 8, 1774. Fox played the gallant gay Lothario brilliantly; the livery servant in the kitchen, aping his master’s manners, was acted with abundant low humour, free from vulgarity. But, whether there was incautious management during the piece, or incautious revelry after it, the fine old house was burned to the ground before the morning. It was then that Fox turned more than before to public business; but without giving up any of his private enjoyments, except those he did not care for.

The duels of this year which gave rise to the most gossip were, first, that between Lord Bellamont and Lord Townshend, and next the one between Messrs. Temple and Whately. The two lords fought (after some shifting on Townshend’s side) on a quarrel arising from a refusal of Lord Townshend, in Dublin, to receive Bellamont. The offended lord was badly shot in the stomach, and a wit (so called) penned this epigram on the luckier adversary:—

Says Bell’mont to Townshend, ‘You turned on your heel,