Lady Mary had the satisfaction of declin- | bolder mode of warfare. We are left in ing several and, finally, of accepting one proposal of marriage. This time a ducal coronet had been the prize competed for; the Earl of March the cost at which it had to be attained. the dark as to what actually occurred; Lady Louisa Stuart only tells us that he paid his betrothed a morning visit, and — "got what he wanted: an outrageous box on the ear and the command never to approach her doors again." The fashionable world was amazed to learn that this wild and profligate young He was nobly indifferent to public nobleman, cousin and heir to the Duke of opinion, but, being to a great extent deQueensberry, and himself in after life pendent upon the good-will and favor of notorious as "old Q," should have en- the head of his house, he now justified tered into a matrimonial engagement, and himself by throwing upon Lady Mary the that, too, with a lady known to have a high entire blame for the breach of engagetemper, indomitable strength of will, and ment; affecting to feel much aggrieved tastes and habits so much at variance with by her unaccountable proceedings. What his own. It is true that the proposed alli- had he done to incur her displeasure? ance was hailed by the Duke and Duchess Why had she, after Queen Elizabeth's of Queensberry as the means of weaning "Go hang manner towards a fallen fatheir young kinsman from his evil courses, vorite, sent him from her presence with a and converting him into a decent member tingling cheek? He was unconscious of of society; but Lord March showed him- wilful offence, but even if he had allowed self little disposed to encourage such the passion of an ardent lover to overstep hopes. He openly proclaimed that he had the strict rules of conventional propriety, never for a moment entertained any inten- surely this was no such unpardonable sin, tion of marrying; but that Lady Mary, more especially as he had tendered the instead of rejecting the unlawful proposals most humble apologies. It was very he had made to her, as she had a right to cruel, very unjust of her, so to reward his do, had, on the contrary, led him on, devotion, and wreck his hopes of a happy and finally entangled him in matrimonial future! Knowing, however, her firmness meshes. Matters had gone too far to of character and unbending resolutions, allow of his withdrawing; but he ventured he feared, alas! that he must look upon to hope that his betrothed would release his rejection as final, and bear this wound him from these unwelcome bonds. To to his affections as best he could. effect this object he now assumed much the same attitude towards her, that she, during her first engagement, had adopted towards Lord Coke. He rarely addressed his future wife in society; ignored her presence in public; spoke of her with studied disdain or indifference, and even went so far as to exhibit himself in places where they were likely to meet, as in the Park or at Ranelagh, by the side of his acknowledged mistress, Madame Rena, an opera singer, who continued to live under his roof and to drive about conspicuously in a chariot emblazoned with his arms. And so, having played out his little comedy, he finally started for a Continental tour in company with Madame Rena.* It must be allowed that ambition had hitherto played a more prominent part than love in Lady Mary's matrimonial ventures, and to this ambition she now determined to give a different direction. The personal charms, social gifts, and high talents with which she believed herself to have been endowed by Providence would, she felt assured, find a more con genial and a wider field for their exercise and influence in the atmosphere of a bril liant court, than in any form of domestic life; and to the attainment of a commanding position in royal circles she accordingly determined to devote her future efforts. In the pursuit of this project the first person whose patronage and favor the proud and virtuous daughter of the house of Argyll now sought, was Lady Yarmouth; and to reconcile this with her Lady Mary, however, remained, as Lord Coke had done in similar circumstances, perfectly unmoved under these insults, probably, like him, biding her time to be revenged. She continued to smile upon Lord March with gracious dignity, made excuses for his irregularities and resented, as a reflection upon the honor of her future husband, all attempts at interference on the part of friends and relations, when these urged her to break off a marriage affording so little prospect of happiness. Disconcerted by this passive resistance Hertford, and was the mother of the fourth marquess, to his manœuvres, Lord March adopted a It was a daughter of this lady, known as Maria Fagniani, who in 1798 married the third Marquess of on whose death s. p. in 1870 the title passed out of the direct line. austere moral principles, she chose to assume that the intimacy between King George and his German favorite had been sanctified by a private marriage. But even if no such formality had taken place Lady Mary's reverence for royalty would have enabled her to condone the offence, since she considered kings to be exempt from the moral obligations imposed upon the vulgar; and that in such cases a woman might be allowed to plead the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign in extenuation of her transgression. Besides, Lady Yarmouth, though she still exercised much influence at court, was by this time a dull, dowdy, well-conducted, elderly woman, with no pretensions to wit or beauty. She was free, too, from the fault, so commonly ascribed to royal favorites, of interfering in affairs of State. Indeed, the only offence which the nation could lay to her charge was the putting up to public auction of places, titles, and ribbons; a practice which, probably on grounds of economy, the king fully approved. We are told that when, on one occasion, the lady boasted of having refused the offer of a very large bribe, his Majesty inquired: "And vy was you such a great fool?” So Lady Mary bowed low before the king's mistress, and conspicuously wore upon her beautiful arm a bracelet enclosing a lock of Lady Yarmouth's hair. If the young prince at first felt flattered by such homage, there was too little sentiment in his nature to allow of his continuing to appreciate an affection which gave no promise of bearing fruit, except at a price which he was by no means disposed to pay. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any one, except Lady Mary herself, viewed these relations in a serious light, though they afforded a fertile subject for joke and gossip in court circles. The Lady Augusta used to speak laughingly of "my sister Mary," and the graceless prince himself diverted his friends with coarsely expressed accounts of the pompous admiration of which he was the object, of my lady's alternate reserve and encouragement, and of her undisguised determination to become the wife of his bosom. The sudden death of the young prince, at Modena in 1767, was probably the greatest grief which Lady Mary Coke suffered in the course of her long life; though the parade she made of her lamentations is hardly consistent with genuine feeling, and the entries in her journal seem to indicate that sorrow for his loss was aggravated by suspicions of his constancy. For weeks after the tidings reached her she professes to have been almost entirely deprived of sleep, and the few snatches of repose vouchsafed to her were haunted by painful visions of a faithless prince : I dreampt of the duke; that I thought he took no particular notice of me, which surprised me. I dreampt again of the duke. I thought we were together in a church and both kneeling down, but that he got up and left me. No message by his servant! That he would not think of me when he was dying is indeed very extraordinary and what I could not have believed; but in a few days, if I hear nothing, it will then be out of doubt. The young princes, George the Second's grandchildren, were now growing to man's estate. Their aunt, the Princess Amelia, described them as "the best humored asses that ever were born;" but in Lady Mary Coke's eyes royal blood more than compensated for the want of intellectual or physical gifts, and the dignified court lady of thirty-two now lost her heart, or whatever represented that organ in her cold, well-regulated nature, to the Duke of York, a boy in his twentieth year, of "a little mean figure and a pale face," says Lady Louisa," with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and a certain tremulous motion of the eye, that was far from adding to its beauty." He, moreover, already • Second daughter of Frederic, Prince of Wales, showed precocious symptoms of the profli- afterwards Duchess of Brunswick. According to Lady Louisa Stuart the practice of styling the female memgate habits and the vulgar taste for practi-bers of the royal family "Princess," had been imported cal jokes and horse-play, for which he was from Germany on the accession of the house of Hannotorious throughout his brief and inglo- English habits, probably in a spirit of opposition to his over. The Prince of Wales, who studiously affected rious career. But Lady Mary held peculiar views, and had he possessed the beauty of Adonis, and the accomplishments of the Admirable Crichton, she could not have treated him with a more profound reverence, or a greater devotion. On the occasion of the prince's funeral she descended into the vault to weep and pray beside the coffin, and this loud-voiced thoroughly German father, revived the old English grief lasted a long time. The mention of his name brought on a flood of tears, and a child's chance allusion to Westminster Abbey produced a fit of hysterics; but the honest and sensible Princess Amelia, who knew the actual state of affairs, had no patience with such displays, and on one occasion checked the accustomed outbreak by this cruel, if wholesome, admonition: 66 My good lady, if you would but know what a joke he always used to make of you, you would soon have done crying for him." The failure of the happiness which Lady Mary had successively sought in an alliance with a future earl, a future duke, and an actual prince of the blood had left her sorely wounded. "I was not born to be happy; the same ill-fortune which attended me in early life pursues me still," she writes in her journal at this time; but she was not altogether discouraged yet, for when Lord Bessborough, in showing her over his magnificent house, had expressed the hope that she would consent to become its mistress, she, while professing the greatest respect and regard for his lordship, came to the conclusion that she "might do better," even if she had not been "still too much attached to the memory of the PERSON who is gone, to think of any other engagement." The same year that carried off the PERSON deprived Lady Mary of her mother, for whom she entertained but little affection, and whom she had ever treated with scant respect. Those blunt manners, and that utter want of due reverence for exalted rank which, to the last, continued to characterize her Grace, were not to be excused or forgiven. What is to be done with a woman who does not know how to efface herself in presence of royalty? Imagine the agony of mind which poor Lady Mary must have suffered during a scene which she describes in a long and pathetic letter to her sister, on the occasion of the Princess Amelia and the Duchess of Brunswick honoring her mother with a visit, and when the latter "quite forgot that they were princesses, or that there were any forms due to them. ... She went before them into every room. ...'Pray Maram, observe my pretty deer, my turkeys, and my sheep. Did you ever see anything like them? ... but Maram, I must show you my bed-chamber' (and in she walked before them); here is Pug's bed; and this is my little dressing-room; pray look at that chair; pray set down in it.'" Had her Grace of Argyll danced a reel in church her daughter could not have been more scandalized: " Happy was I when they got into the coach," she says, and when she was able to apologize for her mother's misconduct, on the ground of her advanced age and the retired life she had led for so many years. The two princesses were probably far more disposed to laugh at Lady Mary's agitation and "hurryd spirits" than to resent the freedom of their hostess, the simple, good-natured "Duchess Jenny," of whose bad manners we shall hear no more; for a few weeks later the journal records how, on receiving the tidings of her mother's death, "I lay in bed twelve hours in the hopes of composing my spirits, and though I sought distraction in reading I found that I could not amuse myself." Then follow platitudes on life and death, full details as to the funeral which should be conducted on a scale befitting the rank of the deceased, and the touching remark that it was "a very melancholy office to be obliged to open the draws of any person who is just dead." For nearly a whole fortnight the journal contains no record of "Lu parties," or even of the domestic cribbage. Years passed, and Lady Mary Coke still failed to "do better." No suitor worthy of her notice was found daring enough to descend into the abbey crypt, and to resuscitate the heart buried in the PERSON'S tomb. To make matters worse, other women, boasting not one tithe of her pretensions, succeeded in advancing themselves. There was evidently something wrong in the social system. Of the fate that awaited her in a future state, she had no fears or misgivings; but how came it that in this life merits, like hers, did not meet with their reward? In 1769 the following entry in the journal gives expression to these melancholy reflections: I make no doubt of Miss Chudleigh being Duchess of Kingston; infamy seeming to prosper, while virtue appears under a cloud, neglected and oppressed. Who is considered by the world for being virtuous, or for acting a nobly disinterested part? Does such conduct gain anything but the satisfaction of one's own conscience? I have experienced neglect of all kinds, from my most intimate acquaintances, and even from those who call themselves my unfortunate, which I find, of all others, the friends; yet I have only been most inexcusable fault. The Miss Chudleigh who forms the text of this homily had in her time played many parts on the social stage, and had had her exits and her entrances, "the end being perfect ruin," or nearly so. In 1743, while a maid of honor to the Princess of Wales, she had contracted a clandestine marriage with Mr. Augustus Hervey, a young sea lieutenant, and brother of the Earl of Bristol, who, after a few days of wedded bliss, sailed away to Port Mohun in his country's service, while the bride resumed her virginal duties at the court of St. James's. The secret was well kept for many years, and when, finally, the husband took steps to establish the marriage, not with a view to domestic happiness, but to divorce, for which his wife had fully qualified herself, she succeeded in obtaining a judgment in the Spiritual Court legally establishing her contention that no such contract had been entered into between them. Considering herself thus free she, in 1769, publicly married one of her many lovers, the old Duke of Kingston, who, dying six years later, left her the greater part of his large disposable possessions. In order to recover these his Grace's heirs determined to have the duke's marriage annulled on the ground of its having been bigamous; and the Duchess of Kingston was accordingly arraigned before the House of Peers on the charge of having "by force of arms feloniously married Evelyn Pierpoint, her husband, Augustus John Hervey, being then alive." Acting in the double capacity of a court of appeal and a criminal court, my lords quashed the decision of the spiritual judges upon which the prisoner rested her defence, and, rising one by one, with hand laid on heart, each noble lord declared her to be "Guilty, upon my honor." Bigamy was in those days a capital offence, and the handsome and witty twicewedded maid of honor, who had by this time attained the mature age of fifty, would doubtless have been sentenced to branding and transportation to the colonies but for the happy accident of Mr. Hervey having, shortly before the trial, succeeded to his brother's earldom. The convict being able to plead privilege of peerage, as Countess of Bristol, thus escaped the penalty of her crime. It may be conceived how such an incident must have agitated fashionable society, and what a theme it afforded for the gossips. "Why all this fuss?" asks Horace Walpole, "and what are we coming to if Lady Mary's journal, begun in 1766, the two bulky volumes of which, now printed as a first instalment, barely embrace three years, was composed in the form of weekly or bi-weekly news-letters addressed to her sisters, and continued almost without inwho have turned over the leaves of an old terruption for twenty-five years. Those book of fashions and asked themselves in amused wonder how their grandmothers ulous, will understand the effect produced could have made themselves look so ridic. by a cursory glance at these volumes, but which, studied more closely, become wearisome beyond description. Never, perhaps, was there told in pretentious print the story of a more vapid or frivo lous life. From first to last there is no vestige of a high purpose, a serious pursuit, an ennobling thought; an intellectual or artistic taste. With the few exceptions hereafter referred to, the journal is only a fine lady's record of a dull, unvarying round of assemblies and card parties, of Petty gossip and stale scandals, interspersed with much twaddling sentiment, religious cant, and disagreeable details of dinners and suppers eaten, with their effect upon the digestive organs of the writer. be expected in so artificial a nature, but Originality or depth of feeling is not to there is something exceptional in such an entire absence of any sense of duty, of sympathy or consideration for others, as the journal betrays. One entry, indeed, from its novelty of tone arrests attention: Thank you for inquiring after Alphen; she is perfectly well now, but has eat no meat since her illness. She has broth and bread twice a day, which agrees with her surpris ingly. So after all this grande dame could descend to minister by the bedside of some humble friend or faithful dependent; but we read on and are disillusioned; Alphen was a dog. Lady Mary is much dissatisfied with the bad company that she meets at the court of St. James's, which want of exclusiveness she attributes to a recent regulation under which the right of entrée Letter to Rev. William Mason. 7th Aug., 1775. was extended to the wives of privy councillors. Indeed there remained only two ceremonials worthy of being graced by her presence, and these, a coronation and the trial of a peer, were in the nature of things of comparatively rare occurrence. Although, then, court news is regularly recorded in the journal, and mention is made among other important events of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Fourth, having been "put in breeches on a given day, it is mainly made up of tedious accounts of the routine of fashionable society, in which eating plays a very important part. Here are a few extracts illustrative of the Lady Mary's culinary experiences as she records them for the information of her sisters: It was two o'clock before I returned to the inn, where I found my dinner ready. It was not good by any means. Tough chickens, mutton not half rosted, pees villenously old, and the jam current tart made in a glass, you know. I eat, however, heartily, and returned a little after seven where I am now waiting for my supper. Set off half-an-hour after six to return visits; made thirty-six and ended at Lady Holderness. Played at Lu, and won sixteen guineas. Hertford, where I played at Lu till eleven, Made thirty-two visits, and ended at Lord and won eleven guineas. Eat my rosted apples; read a little in the bible; went to bed. Rose at my usual hour. The old Duchess of Argyll considered After breakfast worked in my garden an hour the "Assembly in King Street," as the was an hour and a half in dressing. At future" Almack's" was then called, an five went to Mackenzie's. Eat more than improper resort for young people; but usual of an excellent haunch of venison Lady Mary had no fault to find with it except on the score of its dulness; whereas she declared Ranelagh to be always bril undressed, eat my supper and prepared for bed. I was very indiscreet and eat so many little eels that my stomach was disordered last night. We had two very large carp for supper, but very muddy. At a ball at Lord Hertford's, where dancing began at half past seven, "every. thing at supper was cold excepting pees, beans, soops and fish," notwithstanding which her ladyship boasts of having had a "very good stomach." Card-playing ranks only next to eating, the games being Lu, quadrille, cribbage, tresdille, faron, quinze, and occasionally "a ruber of whisk." The stakes appear to have been high, since Lady Mary's winnings or losings at one sitting occa sionally exceed fifty guineas: Lady Harrington's party broke up sooner than usual, and she came to our table. I lost five guineas, came home about half after eleven, read a little in the bible, and went to bed. Played at Lu; won eleven guineas, and did not come home till near twelve o'clock. Read three chapters in Revelations. His Royal Highness was just sitting down liant. The following description of an entertainment there is characteristic, though the language is rather such as a smart Abigail might employ than that of a great court lady. I think I never saw so much great company plenty, and I believe I may say, hundreds of there was ten Duchesses, Countesses in the nobility; but not one Royal Person. Here is a conversation between two grandes dames which is thought worthy of being recorded in the journal: The Duchess of Bedford, who, you know, gives herself airs, said at Gunneysbury, "did ever anybody see such creatures as the Princes of Sax Goth?" I asked her Grace if she knew them? "No, it was the first time she had seen them." I then told her that I had that honor, and that I could assure her that but had the manners of a man of distinction. the eldest Prince was not only very sensible, This seemed to offend her, for she turned to me and said: "I am very glad to hear it! I wish your Ladyship may be hereditary Princess of Sax Goth." I smiled, and thanked her Grace for the great honor she did me, but |