graduates, not in fame, but in infamy. Nothing could well be worse, except the infamy of him who must have passed many a night in penning that unutterably horrible and scandalous chronicle. The chronicler, on the other hand, is not to be blamed for noting the little affectations of those whom he encountered, as in the following example, the date of which is 1781: “I met,” he says to Lady Ossory, “Mrs. Montagu the other night at a visit. She told me she had been alone the whole preceding day, quite hermetically sealed. I was very glad she was uncorked, or I might have missed that piece of learned nonsense.” However, “Mrs. Montagu,” writes Mrs. Boscawen to Mrs. Delany, “is in perfect health and spirits in her Château Portman.” But, in Montagu House, Portman Square, the so-called Bluestockings were much less at home than in Hill Street. Nevertheless, there, and at similar houses supposed to be of a Bluestocking class, Walpole was much more amused than when he was at the Princess Amelia’s, at Gunnersbury, with the “cream of the cream” of Europe, and playing commerce with the grandest of them. He never had to say of himself at Mrs. Montagu’s, as he did of his doings at the Princess’s, “Played three pools of commerce till ten. I am afraid I was tired, and gaped!” There died in this year, 1781, a Provincial Bluestocking,—who has been delicately praised by Miss Seward, and furiously attacked and ridiculed by Horace Walpole,—Mrs. Miller, the neighbour of Mrs. Scott and Lady Bab Montagu at Batheaston. There is an old story that Walpole, declining to recognise a man in London whom he had known at Bath, explained himself by saying, that he would be happy to know the same individual again—at Bath! So, with regard to literary or _bas-bleu_ assemblies, he acknowledged those only of London. Provincial meetings he treated as shams, and covered them with ridicule. Mrs. Miller’s house,—to which she invited a rather mixed assembly of persons distinguished for intellectual merit, or persons who were distinguished only by the accident of birth,—Walpole mis-named the “puppet-show Parnassus at Batheaston” (or Pindus)—“a new Parnassus, composed of three laurels, a myrtle-tree, a weeping willow, and a view of the Avon, which has been new-christened Helicon.” Miss Rich, Lady Lyttelton’s sister, took Walpole to dine there.... He ridiculed his hosts, described Captain Miller as officious, though good-natured, who, with his wife, had caught “taste,” and outlived their income. Having (like wise and honest people) recovered themselves by living economically abroad, they resumed their old home with improved habits. “Alas!” says Walpole, “Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle de Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. Vesey. They have introduced _bouts-rimés_ as a new discovery. They hold a Parnassus fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux and quality of Bath contend for the prizes.