Clad in a milk-white vest.
Despite the efforts of the duke and the men of Kent, they were defeated by Surrey, and the duke met with disaster:
“O heavy news!” the Rector cried,
“The Vine can witness be,
We have not any cricketer
Of such account as he.”
It is satisfactory to learn that in the return match Surrey was beaten.
§ iii
We come now to the period when “the gay Duke of Dorset became ambassador in Paris,” and “his encouragement of the Parisian ballet was the amazement and envy of his age.” It is entertaining, and rather sad, to read both his official despatches from Paris and his private letters to his friends, and to reflect that while he was writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, “I suppose you will hear talk of my ball, it has made a great noise at Paris”; or to the Foreign Office, “It is hardly possible to conceive a moment of more perfect tranquility than the present, the French government, free from the late causes of its anxiety, appears entirely bent upon improving the advantages of peace,”—it is sad, and certainly ironical, to reflect that the taking of the Bastille was distant by a paltry three years. With no foreboding of those tremendous events, which more than any war, more even than the career of Napoleon, were to change the fortunes of humanity, the Court of France and the English envoy continued on their course of enjoyment. The Duke of Dorset became, naturally, extremely popular in Paris. He was himself not sure that he wholly liked the French:
All the French are aimable, si vous voulez, but they are capricious and inconstant, especially the women [he wrote home to the Duchess of Devonshire]; in short, I have really no friend here but Mrs. B. [Marie Antoinette], and then I see her so seldom that I forget half what I want to say to her. The Frenchmen are all jealous and treacherous, so that between the capriciousness of the fair sex and the want of confidence I have in the other je me sens vraiment malheureux, I assure you, my dearest duchess.