a subscription masquerade. Horace, in his sneering way, says, "It is not quite unlucky for her : she had outlived the Prince's love and her own face, and nothing remained but her love and her person, which was exceedingly bad. Her exit was commemorated in three doggrel lines: Poor Jenny Conway, She drank lemonade So now she's dead and gone away. WOMANLY CONSOLATION. One night, at a large rout, great panic was expressed about the French; when Lady Rochford, looking down on her fan, said with great softness: "I don't know: I don't think the French are a sort of people that women need be afraid of." ODD PAYMENT. Caroline Vernon lost one night two hundred pounds at faro, and bade Martindale mark it up. He said he would rather have a draft on her banker. "Oh! willingly;" and she gave him one. Next morning he hurried to Drummond's, lest all her money should be drawn out. Sir," said the clerk, "would you receive the contents immediately?" "Assuredly." Why, Sir, have you read the note?" Martindale took it it was, "Pay to the bearer two hundred blows, well applied.” PUBLIC SPEAKING. 66 ; The Duchess of Gordon, "one of the Empresses of Fashion,' coming out of an assembly, said to Dundas, "Mr. Dundas, you are used to speak in public; will you call my servant?" This Duchess had more wit than any of Walpole's old sayers of good things; but she was also coarser than they ventured to be. GARDENING AND PUNCTUATION. Hannah More tells us that Capability Brown illustrated everything he said about gardening by some literary or grammatical allusion; and he compared his art to literary composition. "Now, there," said he, pointing with his finger, "I make a comma; and there," pointing to another spot, where 66 a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view,a parenthesis-now a full stop; and then I begin another subject." CIVIC SAPIENCE. Two stories are related of an absurd Lord Mayor, one about the copy of a letter taken after the original was lost-and the other-hearing of a gentleman who had the small-pox twice and died of it, he asked if he died the first time or the second. LIFE OF A SPENDTHRIFT. But no Among the celebrities of the latter half of the last century was General Sir John Irwin, who, besides a regiment and government conferred on him by the Crown, held, for several years, the post of Commander-in-Chief in Ireland. income, however large, could suffice for his expenses. At one of the entertainments which he gave to the Lord Lieutenant, in Dublin, he displayed as the centre piece of the dessert a representation of the fortress of Gibraltar invested by the Spanish force, executed in confectionery, a model of the celebrated rock, with the works, batteries, and artillery of the besiegers throwing sugar-plums against the walls. This piece of folly cost nearly 1,5007.! Irwin was a great favourite of George III., who once observed to him, "They tell me, Sir John, that you love a glass of wine." "Those," replied Irwin, "who so informed your Majesty have done me great injustice; they should have said a bottle." Irwin's extravagant mode of living involved him in endless pecuniary difficulties; and while the General was abroad, in great distress, George III. twice sent him a present of 5007. His debts became so numerous, and his creditors so importunate, that he privately quitted his elegant house in Piccadilly, opposite the Green Park, and retired to the Continent. There he hired a chateau in Normandy; but his pecuniary difficulties continuing, he removed over the Alps, into Italy; he is said to have died at Padua, in May, 1788, in obscurity, but not in distress. DISTINCTION WITHOUT DIFFERENCE. In 1792, the Duchess of York gave a great entertainment at Oatlands on her Duke's birthday. A company of strollers came to Weybridge to act in a barn; she was solicited to go to it, and did out of charity, and carried all her servants. Next day a Methodist came to preach a charity sermon in the same theatre, and she consented to hear it on the same motive; but her servants desired to be excused on not understanding English. "Oh!" said the Duchess, "but you went to the comedy, which you understood less, and you shall go to the sermon ;" to which she gave handsomely, and for them. CIVIC ENJOYMENT. In 1800, on November 8, the usual festivities were kept up with great spirit at the Mansion House, it being the day of the Lord Mayor (Combe) retiring from office, and the assumption of its duties by his successor, Sir William Staines. The honest knight loved his pipe, and was accordingly indulged with one. In yielding up his place and honours to him, the late chief magistrate, Combe, had the good nature to share in the humour of his successor; and they were observed, after dinner, lighting their pipes at one candle, like the Duke of Buckingham's two Kings of Brentford, smelling at one nosegay. Alderman Boydell, when he lived at the corner of Ironmonger-lane, in Cheapside, had a strange mode of refreshing himself on the morning after a civic feast: leaving his shop, he would go to the pump in Ironmonger-lane, and there taking off his wig, place his bare head beneath the cooling stream. A CRUEL CASE. Lady Cathcart, who died in 1798, had four husbands, of whom Lord Cathcart was the third; the fourth was a Captain Macguire, an Irish officer, who, not much pleased with the posy on her wedding-ring If I survive, I'll have five, took her to Ireland, and kept her there, in solitary durance, for twenty years, when he died, and her Ladyship returned to dance at the Welwyn Assembly. MR. PITT'S IDEAS OF WOMEN. Mr. Pitt is stated, by Lady Hester Stanhope, to have ardently loved the daughter of Lord A, and that he almost broke his heart when he gave her up. But he considered that she was not a woman to be left at her will when business might require it, and he sacrificed his feelings to his sense of public duty. "Yet (adds Lady Hester) Mr. Pitt was a man just made for domestic life, who would have enjoyed his own retirement, digging his own garden, and doing it cleverly too." “There were other reasons," " Mr. Pitt would say, against this match; "there is her mother, such a chatterer! and then the family intrigues. I can't keep them out of my house, and for my King's and country's sake, I must remain a single man." He used to say, he considered "no man ought to marry who could not give a proper share of his time to his wife; for how would it be if he was always at the House, or in business, and she always at the Opera, or whirling about in her carriage?" "People," says Lady Hester, "thought Mr. Pitt did not care about women, and knew nothing about them; but they were very much mistaken. Mrs. B- of Devonshire, when she was Miss W was so pretty, that Mr. Pitt drank out of her shoe. Nobody understood shape, and beauty, and dress, better than he did; with a flame of his eye he saw it all at once. But the world was ignorant of much respecting him. Whoever thought that there was not a better judge of women in London than he ? and not only of women as they present themselves to the eye, but that his knowledge was so critical as to analyse their features and persons in a most masterly way? Not a defect, not a blemish, escaped him he would detect a shoulder too high, a limp in the gait, where nobody else would have seen it; and his beauties were real, natural, beauties. In dress, too, his taste was equally refined. I shall never forget when I had arranged the folds and drapery of a beautiful dress which I wore one evening, how he said to me, 'Really, Hester, you are bent on conquest to-night; but would it be too bold in me, if I were to suggest that that particular fold'—and he pointed to a triangular fall which I had given to one part-'were looped up so?'-and it was exactly what was wanting to complete the classical form of my dress. "He had so much urbanity, too! I recollect returning late from a ball, when he had gone to bed fatigued; there were others beside myself, and we made a great deal of noise. I said to him next morning, 'I am afraid we disturbed you last night.' 'Not at all,' he replied; 'I was dreaming of the Masque of Comus, Hester, and when I heard you all so gay, it seemed a pleasant reality.' Lady Hester then relates how Mr. Pitt's excellent heart was full of sympathy for persons whom others spurned; and on being told that a lady of this ill-treated class was expected to accompany a guest at Walmer Castle, "My dear Hester," said Mr. Pitt, "for God's sake, don't distress the poor woman, if she is coming-now, pray don't." He then gave orders that she should have the bedroom in the house, while others, who were expected, were to be sent to the village. MR. PITT'S LOVE OF PORT WINE. Mr. Rogers has left these reminiscences of the statesman's port-drinking: "During his boyhood, Pitt was very weakly; and his physician, Addington (Lord Sidmouth's father), ordered him to take port wine in large quantities; the consequence was, that when he grew up he could not do without it. Lord Grenville has seen him swallow a bottle of port in tumblerfuls before going to the House. This, together with his habit of eating late suppers (indigestible cold veal pies, &c.), helped, undoubtedly, to shorten his life. Huskisson, speaking to me of Pitt, said that his hands shook so much that, when he helped himself to salt, he was obliged to support the right hand with the left. Stothard, the painter, happened to be one evening at an inn on the Kent Road, when Pitt and Dundas put up there on their way from Walmer. Next morning, as they were stepping into their carriage, the waiter said to Stothard, "Sir, do you observe these two gentlemen ?" "Yes," he replied, "and I know them to be Mr. Pitt and Mr. Dundas." 'Well, sir, how much wine do you suppose they drank last night?" Stothard could not guess. bottles, sir!" LORD PEMBROKE'S PORT WINE. "Seven Lord Palmerston one day related the following anecdote to a deputation of gentlemen, who waited upon him to urge the reduction of the wine duties. Referring to the question of adulterations, "I remember," said his lordship, "my grandfather, Lord Pembroke, when he placed wine before his guests, said: There, gentlemen, is my champagne, my claret, &c. I am no great judge, and I give you this on the authority of my wine-merchant; but I can answer for my port, for I made |