remarked, “You see, sir, I am no longer the man for Mrs. Montagu!” He was not indifferent to this condition of things. “Mrs. Montagu, sir,” he afterward said to a friend, “has dropt me. Now, sir, there are people whom one should like very well to drop, but would not wish to be dropt by.” Good-natured friends embittered the quarrel. Mrs. Vesey “sounded the trumpet,” as was remarked by Walpole, who added: “It has not, I believe, produced any altercation; but at a Bluestocking meeting, held by Lady Lucan, Mrs. Montagu and Johnson kept at different ends of the chamber, and set up altar against altar there. She told me, as a mark of her high displeasure, that she would not ask him to dinner again. I took her aside and fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made Dagon and Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.” Walpole (who in this quarrel was quite as malicious as Mrs. Vesey, whom he affected to laugh at, was indiscreet) called Johnson in another letter referring to this quarrel, “Demagorgon,” and says that the doctor and the lady kept aloof “like the west from the east.” He states that Lady Lucan, whose house was the scene of the comedy, “had assembled a Bluestocking meeting in imitation of Mrs. Vesey’s Babels. It was so blue, it was quite mazarin blue. There were Soame Jenyns, Persian Jones, Mr. Sherlock, the new court, Mr. Courtenay, besides the outpensioners of Parnassus.” And besides those named, every man of whom was a man of intellect, there was Mr. Horace Walpole himself, who certainly was present, because he knew he would not be among fools, though he pretended to go as if he found amusement in their folly. He seems, in the above extract, to recognise the good-natured Irish lady, Mrs. Vesey (whose house in Bolton Row, or subsequently in Clarges Street, was hospitably open to people of merit—proved or promised), as the founder of assemblies to which the slang name of _bas-bleu_ assemblies was given. Referring to Mrs. Montagu, with whom he was very glad to dine, he says (in this year, 1781), “She is one of my principal entertainments at Mrs. Vesey’s, who collects all the graduates and candidates for fame, where they vie with one another till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.” We should honour any lady of the present century who, like Mrs. Vesey, Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Ord, Lady Lucan, and others in the last century, welcomed to their houses, not only all the graduates, but also the candidates for fame. Johnson himself was annoyed when not invited to those intellectual meetings. In 1780, he writes, “I told Lady Lucan how long it was since she sent to me; but she said, I must consider how the world rolls about her.” From the lips of the guests whom Walpole met at the houses indicated he could not carry away the stories that he loved so well as to insert them, in his most exquisite hand, into folios carefully arranged. These still exist; they illustrate phases of life among high-born women and men of the last century who were