‘A lady who once wrote a book,
And one of whom a book’s been written...
One blonde whose fortune is her face,
And one whose face caught her a fortune.’
As for the daily round:
‘We dance, we flirt, we shoot, we ride,
Our host’s a veritable Nimrod:
We fish the river’s silver tide,’
and so on. There are, of course, the county balls, and the fancy balls, and the private theatricals, and what not, all of them celebrated by the inevitable Praed. It was at the county ball that he saw ‘the belle of the ballroom’:
‘There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle.’
It was to the county ball, as well as to the theatricals at Fustian Hall, that Praed’s ‘Clarence’ was so prettily invited. As for fancy balls:
‘Oh, a fancy ball’s a strange affair!
Made up of silks and leathers,
Light heads, light heels, false hearts, false hair,
Pins, paint, and ostrich feathers.’
Of inland watering-places, Bath and Cheltenham have been perhaps most often poetized. Bath found its vates sacer in the author of the ‘New Bath Guide’; it has rarely found one since; its glories have virtually departed. It was at Cheltenham—
‘Where one drinks one’s fill
Of folly and cold water’—
that Praed met his ‘Partner.’ And C. S. Calverley has told us how