have put in the papers a good story made on White's: a man dropped down dead at the door, was carried in; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not; and when they were going to bleed him, the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet."* A great deal of this reckless spirit of gambling, which lasted through the century, and which probably has only clothed itself more decently in our own day, must be attributed to the great increase of the wealth of the aristocracy, through the natural effects of the great increase of the profitable industry of the middle classes. But it cannot be denied that much of the increase flowed back to the sources from which it was derived, in the form of bills, bonds, post-obits, and mortgages. The financial maxim of Charles Fox, that a man need never want money if he was willing to pay enough for it, tended to keep matters somewhat equal. The idea from which we cannot escape, when we trace the history of fashion in the middle of the last century, is, that the prevailing tone indicated something like a general moral intoxication. A succession of stimulants appears necessary to the upholding of social existence. This must be always in some degree the case with the rich and idle, whose vocation is chiefly to what they call pleasure. But we have few glimpses in the letters and memoirs of that period of the disposition to those calm domestic enjoyments which are principally *Horace Walpole to Mann, September 1, 1750. derived from the cultivation of a taste for reading and the arts, and which, in our own day, equally characterises the middle and the upper classes. Of course, under the loosest state of manners, even in the profligate court of Charles II., there must have been many families of the upper ranks who despised the low vices and unintellectual excitements of their equals in birth; and under the most decorous and rational system of life there must be a few who would gladly restore a general licence, and who occasionally signalise themselves by some outbreak. But neither of these constitute a class. In the youth and middle age of Walpole the men and women of fashion appear to have lived without restraint imposed by their own sense of decorum, without apprehension of the opinions of their associates, without the slightest consideration for the good or evil word of the classes below them. "In a regular monarchy the folly of the prince gives the tone; in a downright tyranny folly dares give itself no airs; it is in a wanton overgrown commonwealth that whim and debauchery intrigue together." Every lady or gentleman of spirit was allowed to have a whim, whether it inclined to gambling, or intrigue, or drunkenness, or riots in public places. What Walpole said of the Duke of Newcastle, that he looked like a dead body hung in chains always wanting to be hung somewhere else, gives one a notion of the perpetual restlessness of the fashionable class. The untiring activity of Horace Walpole to Mann. some leaders lasted a good deal longer; and no doubt occasionally displays itself even now in a preternatural energy, which makes the cheek pale in the season of bloom and freshness. But there is now some repose, some intervals for reflexion; the moral intoxication does not last through sixteen of the four-and-twenty hours. The love of sights, the great characteristic of the vulgar of our own day, was emphatically the passion of the great in the last century. The plague was reported to be in a house in the City; and fashion went to look at the outside of the house in which the plague was enshrined. Lady Milton and Lady Temple, on a night in March, put on hats and cloaks, and, sallying out by themselves to see Lord Macclesfield lie in state, "literally waited on the steps of the house in the thick of the mob, while one posse was admitted and let out again for a second to enter.”* The "mob" (by which Walpole usually means an assemblage of people of any station below the aristocracy) paid back this curiosity with interest. The two Miss Gunnings lighted upon the earth of London in 1751, and were declared the handsomest women alive. They can't walk in the Park or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow that they are generally driven away." It is difficult to understand how a real plebeian mob should know anything about the Miss Gunnings, at a time when there were no paragraphs of personality in the meagre newspapers. The Gunning mob was pro 66 *Horace Walpole to Lord Hertford, March 27, 1764. bably a very courtly one. At any rate the curiosity was in common between the high and the low. One of these fair ladies became Duchess of Hamilton. "The world is still mad about the Gunnings: the Duchess of Hamilton was presented on Friday; the crowd was so great that even the noble mob in the drawing-room clambered upon chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs; and people go early to get places at the theatres when it is known they will be there." * Ten years later there was another great sight to which all resorted-the Cock-lane Ghost. How characteristic of the period is the following description of a visit to the den of the ghost !--" We set out from the opera, changed our clothes at Northumberland House, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney-coach, and drove to the spot it rained torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in; at last they discovered it was the Duke of York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another's pockets to make room for us. The house, which is borrowed, and to which the ghost has adjourned, is wretchedly small and miserable. When we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow-candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are mur *Horace Walpole to Mann, March 23, 1752. dering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench. At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes. I asked if we were to have rope-dancing between the acts? We had nothing. They told us, as they would at a puppet-show, that it would not come that night till seven in the morning, that is, when there are only 'prentices and old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one." Imagine a prince of the blood, two noble ladies, a peer, and the son of a prime minister, packing in one hackney-coach from Northumberland House on a winter's night, and in a dirty lane near Smithfield watching till half-past one by the light of a tallow-candle, amidst fifty of the "unwashed," for the arrival of a ghost! In those days the great patron of executions was the fashionable George Selwyn; and this was the way he talked of such diversions:-"Some women were scolding him for going to see the execution [of Lord Lovat,] and asked him, 'how he could be such a barbarian to see the head cut off?' 'Nay,' says he, if that was such a crime, I am sure I have made amends, for 1 went to see it sewed on again.'" When M'Lean, the highwayman, was under sentence of death in Newgate, he was a great attraction to the fashionable world. "Lord Mountford, at the head of half White's, went the first day. **** But the chief personages who have been to comfort and weep over this fallen hero are Lady Caroline * Horace Walpole to Montagu, February 2, 1762. |