A court is always more or less a scene of persiflage. Its habitual frequenters seek to relieve the heavy sense of the formality of etiquette by turning it into jest in their asides. In a court where the monarch, even when present in the body, might be conceived to be absent in the spirit, this disposition naturally run riot. Poor timid Anne was not a person to impose much restraint by her presence. Liberties were taken with her more energetic successors, partly because it was presumed that they did not understand what was going on, partly because the pert frivolities of the court, in an age when the aristocracy had gained so striking a victory over the Crown, could not bring themselves to believe that the great feudatories of the empire were of a higher nobility than the Peers of England, and made mockery of manners which differed from their own. The first two German monarchs remained through life exotics caged in St. James's as palpably as any canaries brought from the Rhine. Their attendants frisked in their presence with as little care and deference for them as sparrows testify in the presence of a wooden eagle.

The Whigs and Tories of the days of Queen Anne bandied angry looks even in her presence. Swift, in his Journal to Stella,' has an entry under the date December 16, 1711, which indicates the terms on which the hostile factions mingled within the walls of St. James's :-" I took courage and went to Court with a very cheerful countenance. It was mightily crowded; both parties coming to observe each other's faces. I have avoided Lord Halifax's bow till he forced it upon me; but we did not talk together. I could not make less than fourscore bows, of which about twenty might be to Whigs." It was only, however, for great occasions that strong expressions of feeling were reserved. They were more accustomed like cats to deal a sudden, and by the bystanders scarcely noticed scratch, from a paw of velvet. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Horace Walpole, and their noble contemporaries, are the perfection of the habitual style of conversation in the circles in which they moved. The genius of no single man (" nor woman either, though by your smiling you seem to say so") could have accumulated such stores of satirical gossip. The literary talents of the two writers we have named enabled them to give a lasting form to the rich materials which the collective gossips of the Court had been accumulating for half a century; and the language they employed had been polished and pointed by the successive efforts of Hervey, Chesterfield, and a whole host of kindred spirits. It was an age of lampoons. the members of the Court circle, not contented with laughing at each other, called in the public to share in the sport. "In those old days," says Lady Louisa Stuart, people's brains being more nimble than their fingers, ballads swarmed as abundantly as caricatures are swarming at present, and were struck off almost as hastily, whenever wit and humour or malice and scurrility found them a theme to fasten upon. A ballad was sure to follow every incident that had in

it a ludicrous corner from

'A woful christening late there did

In James's house befal,'

and the king's turning his son and daughter out of doors after it, down to a lady's dropping her shoe in the Park.* Though printed on the coarsest paper, sung * To the same class belong Sir Charles Williams's "Jekyll's Ghost appearing to Sandys," in imitation of

about the streets and sold for halfpence, they often came from no mean quarter" -or were purchased by people of rank to pass off as their own.

The costume of the age assisted the development of this highly-prized talent for persiflage. The wearers of such solid frames of whalebone and buckram must have felt whenever they put them on that they were arming themselves to do battle. They could not converse out of them, without feeling that they were pitted against each other like controversial divines stuck up face to face in opposing pulpits. Feeling themselves armed, the impulse to lay about them was irresistible. A court so attired could not fail to grow up into a huge School for Scandal." And on the other hand, one can scarcely conceive the spirit which animates that comedy fully developed in the pliable, accessible, modern dress. Shut up with themselves, and shut out from others by these barricades, people could not get near enough each other to acquire a fellow-feeling. This was, in great part, the secret of the constant interchange of polished sarcasms among the Chesterfields, Lady Mary Wortley Montagues, and Horace Walpoles. This tone could not survive the change of costume. When court dresses came to be assumed only upon the occasion of visits to court, their wearers did not feel sufficiently at home in them to turn them to account. Once was it our lot to see a "Reform M.P." for Birmingham, on quitting a levee, unable to find a coach, and obliged to walk uneasily and shamefacedly through the crowd of modern dresses; the very picture of David, essaying in vain to walk in the armour of Saul. Cumbrous it was, the costume of the Georgian era, but not so utterly fantastic and uncomfortable as men now deem it. The dress, though it looks stiff to us, sat lightly on those accustomed to it. Its wearers were not altogether assimilated to their outward integuments. They had minds above buttons, though encased in embroidered coats and seven-fold hoops: they could laugh at their own figures:-"As Prince Eugene" (the narrator is Swift, and the time 1712) "was going with Mr. Secretary to court, he told him, that Mr. Hoffman, the emperor's resident, said to his highness, that it was not proper to go to court without a long wig, and his was a tied-up one. Now, says the prince, I know not what to do: for I never had a long periwig in my life; and I have sent to all my valets and footmen to see whether any of them have one, that I might borrow it; but none of them had any.' Was not this spoken very greatly, with some sort of contempt? But the secretary said, 'It was a thing of no consequence, and only observed by gentlemen ushers."" And what was defective in that age's costume in form, was made up by its richness and variety in colour; even clergymen looked more gaily then than beaux do now:-" My dress," says Swift, giving an account of a pleasure excursion in Windsor Park, "was light camlet, faced with red velvet, and silver buttons."

There have been awkward cubs in all times. In the age of chivalry, there were knights so awkward as to be sure to be unhorsed, whoever laid spear in rest against them; and in the "Augustan age" of England there were individuals William and Margaret, and his "Jekyll's Ghost appearing to Lord Hervey." From a passage in H. Walpole's Memoirs of George II., the caricature seems to have been growing into fashion about the time of Byng's trial:"Anson was joined in all the satiric prints with his father-in-law, Newcastle and Fox. A new species of this manufacture was invented by Charles Townshend; these were caricatures on cards. The original one, which had an amazing vent, was of Newcastle and Fox looking at each other, and crying, with Peachum in The Beggar's Opera, Brother, brother, we are both in the wrong."

·

upon whom court dresses and court costumes sat uneasily. "It is meat and drink to me," said Touchstone, “to see a fool." The feeling is universal: every helpless awkward lout is a Sampson in civilised society-drawn out to make mirth to the Philistines. Not that they were "all fools" to whom at times it fell to be "the cause of wit in others." Bubb Doddington was no fool: he could take tolerably good care of number one, and had a taste for books and splendid furniture. His rich birthday suits, say his biographers, were cut up to make hangings for his state-beds. But Bubb was "a full solempne man," and the sufferings of the grave Malvolio, among the high fantastical inmates of the house of the Lady Olivia are but typical of the lot of all that tribe-the men who have more weight in manner than in matter. Bubb was so exquisite in his kind, that for the flouters of his day to think of improving him seems almost like the thought of gilding refined gold, and adding a perfume to the violet. The gravity and good faith with which, when entering in his Diary the defeat of some of his " manœuvres aux choux et aux raves,” he adds, with all the resignation of a saint, his determination to retire into private life, because "out of office it is impossible to serve one's country," seems unsurpassable. Yet the wicked wits of his day did sometimes contrive to take their game out of Bubb. "On the birthday of the Prince of Wales," says Horace Walpole, writing of the events of 1759, "Doddington standing in the circle, the Princess passed him without speaking, the Prince just spoke to him, but affected to cough and walked on; the little Princes, less apprized of his history and accustomed to see him there, talked a good deal to him. Charles Townshend, who stood behind and observed the scene, leaned forward, and in a half-whisper cried, 'Doddington, you are damned well with the youngest.'" Strictly speaking, this is firing a shot out of bounds, for this occurred at Carlton House-but it is characteristic of the class which frequented both houses. What follows occurred in St. James's, and to Lord Chesterfield-for nemo omnibus horis sapit-even adroit courtiers are caught napping. The Countess of Yarmouth, we learn from Horace Walpole, "had a son by the king (George II.), who went by the name of Monsieur Louis, but he was not owned." "The day Lord Chesterfield kissed hands on being appointed secretary of state, after so long an absence from court, he met Sir William Russel, one of the pages, in the ante-chamber of St. James's, and began to make him a thousand compliments and excuses for not having been yet to wait on him and his mamma. The boy heard him with great tranquillity: when the speech was at an end, he said, My Lord, I believe you scarce designed all these honours for me: I suppose you took me for Monsieur Louis!"

This system of laughing and tilting at each other with lances made of waspstings was reserved for the especial amusement of "the order." It is customary to regard the aristocracy of Great Britain as less exclusive, less antique, than that of some continental nations. This is a mistake. The individual creations may be most of them comparatively recent, but in a great majority of instances the parties raised to the peerage have belonged already to the class which has the entrée -cadet branches of older houses; or if of unadulterated plebeian origin, the title has generally had to perform a sort of semi-quarantine, until by dint of intermarriages it was held that a sufficient quantity of noble blood had been transfused into the veins of its wearer. It is not exactly the possession or want of a

title that ennobles in England; there are country gentlemen of old family whom a new title would degrade in point of real rank. This comparative unimportance of the mere title renders, in England, the line of demarcation between commoners and the aristocracy more fluctuating and undefined; there is perhaps a wider range for the nondescript to occupy, but those within the pale do not the less on this account hug themselves on their privileges. Read what Byron, Horace Walpole, and Lady Mary say of plebeian authors who dare say a word in disparagement of "the order," or (what seems more unpardonable still) in favour of it, and as if they were acquainted with its habits and feelings. It was only these high-born or high-bred personages, who were understood to be framed of china-biscuit instead of ordinary clay, in whom such liberties were tolerated. An attempt on the part of one of the vulgar to join in the merriment immediately made the whole circle compose their features, and draw themselves up with as much reserved dignity as the Vicar of Wakefield's daughters when Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs and her accomplished companion sailed into farmer Flamborough's kitchen. Even the audacious Swift, who was never at peace except when engaged in a squabble, was made to feel this and quail before it. "Arbuthnot," he says, in the 'Journal to Stella,' ,"made me draw up a sham subscription for a book, called a History of the Maids of Honour since Harry the Eighth; showing they make the best Wives: with a List of all the Maids of Honour since,' &c.; to pay a crown in hand, and the other crown upon the delivery of the book; and all in the common form of these things. We got a gentleman to write it fair, because my hand is known, and we sent it to the maids of honour, when they came to supper. If they bite at it, 'twill be a very good Court jest; and the Queen will certainly have it." This is written in the overweening confident spirit which characterises the whole of the Journal '— the dream that he was advancing rapidly along the high road to fortune. What follows, written after the lapse of a fortnight, reminds one irresistibly of Launce, leading his disgraced dog out of the Duke's palace-only Swift did not, like his prototype, take the whipping on himself:-" Mrs. Forster taxed me yesterday about the History of the Maids of Honour;' but I told her fairly it was no jest of mine, for I found they did not relish it altogether well."

6

:

It peeps out here that the proud man of letters fretted and chafed at the position which he felt he occupied at Court. He tells Stella that he had got into a scrape by speaking his mind too freely of the quality of the wine served out to the palace-tables to which he was admitted; and he affords us a peep at the style in which his official brethren, the chaplains, were entertained :—“ I never dined with the chaplains till to-day; but my friend Gastrel and the Dean of Rochester had often invited me, and I happened to be disengaged: it is the worst-provided table at Court. We ate on pewter: every chaplain when he is made a dean gives a piece of plate, and so they have got a little, some of it very old." The Court chaplains seem to have stood nearly on the same footing in the royal establishment as the Sir Rogers of the old comedies did in the families of "fine old country gentlemen." Though Swift kicked against the state of vassalage, there have been genuine Sir Rogers among the courtly brotherhood, as witness a note appended in some editions of Swift's works to the passage just quoted, with the signature N.:-"This good old custom is still observed, and

there is now a very handsome stock of plate." It may be remarked by the way that about the time of Swift's venting this groan, the Tatler' was fighting stoutly for a more decorous treatment of domestic chaplains, in virtue of their sacred office. It is not improbable that these remonstrances had some effect, and that they began to be treated in gentlemen's families more as equals, for in a very short time the office fell into abeyance.

The maids of honour who received the jokes of the chaplains so snap. pishly were no unapt analogons of the Abigails who, in the old comedics above alluded to, are generally introduced as counterparts to the ghostly official. These mawkins burrowed in St. James's like does in a rabbit-warren, and each Princess of Wales had her complement. Miss Chudleigh, the celebrated Duchess of Kingston, may be considered as the ideal of this malapert sect. A story is told which, whether true or false, is characteristic both of George II. and of the lady's transcendant impudence. Apartments in Hampton Court Palace having been allotted to her mother, the King good-naturedly asked Miss Chudleigh one day how the old lady felt in her new abode :-" Oh, very well, if the poor woman had only a bed to lie upon!" "That oversight must be repaired," said the King. On this hint the maid of honour (who continued a maid of honour for twenty years after her clandestine marriage with the Hon. Mr. Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol) acted; and in due time there appeared among the royal household accounts, "To a bed and furniture for the apartments of the Hon. Mrs. Chudleigh, 4000l." The King who, though decidedly fond of money, was a man of his word, paid the bill, but remarked, that if Mrs. Chudleigh found the bed as hard as he did, she would never sleep in it. It would require a whole book to recapitulate the scrapes and escapades of these volatile inmates of the palace. Enough has been said to show that the Palace of St. James's during the time that it was the royal residence, notwithstanding the dullness of its outward appearance, as grotesque and stiff as the old grenadiers stuck up at its gateway in some old prints, has witnessed merry doings within its walls. Somewhat incline they did to romping. In a court where a stately, self-admiring monarch like Louis XIV. was the central point of observation, and the sovereign arbiter of conduct, a well-ordered stateliness reigned. But," when the cat's away the mice will play,”-in a Court where the sovereign was little more than an effigy of state, it was to be expected that the attendants would enact "high life below stairs." To such a pitch had their waywardness risen, about the time of the accession of George III., that it had attracted the serious attention of Selina Countess of Huntingdon; the good lady made desperate efforts to establish a mission within the walls-to introduce Whitfield—and at one time, it would appear from her letters, she even flattered herself that she had made an impression upon the mind of one maid of honour. The project failed. The Methodists made something of the ragged rascality of St. Giles's, but the devils which possessed the demireps of St. James's were not for their casting out. But what the preaching of the pious Countess could not accomplish, was effected in a good measure by the watchful and wary discipline of the consort of George III. Queen Charlotte succeeded at least in enforcing upon her maids of honour the observance of external decorum.

Having no wish to walk upon concealed embers, we refrain from touching upon