The elopement of Miss Hunter (a maid of honour, too!) from Bath with the Earl of Pembroke formed one of the most delicious bits of scandal ever discussed in the Rooms, on the Parade, or in the Meadows. The excitement attendant thereon was shared by the whole country; for Kitty Hunter was a well-known, and not at all suspected, beauty of the day. Her father, Orby Hunter, was, at the time of the elopement, one of the lords of the admiralty. The vessel that brought back the fugitives was a privateer, commanded by a friend of Mr. Hunter’s. Kitty’s father declined to receive her, and she accompanied Lord Pembroke abroad. The earl was a married man. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. Her exemplary husband wrote to her from Italy a letter, in which he politely informed her, that though he had lived with her so many years, he regretted to say he had never been able to love her so well as she deserved, so thought it best to leave her. Subsequently, he had the assurance to invite Lady Pembroke to accompany them on the Continent. “And she,” says Walpole, “who is all gentleness and tenderness, was with difficulty withheld from acting as mad a part from goodness as he had acted from guilt and folly.” He had tried to make his wife hate him, but in vain. It is one of the illustrations of social feeling in the last century, that neither the rascal earl nor the light-o’-love maid of honour was thought much the worse of for their shameless conduct. A “Peerage,” of ten years subsequent to the elopement, edited by a clergyman, too! the Rev. Frederick Barlow, vicar of Burton, thus speaks of my lord, who was then living: “His lordship distinguished himself in the annals of gallantry with Miss H—— about ten years ago, and since that time,” it, goes on to speak plainly of the earl’s gallantry, “with several ladies of less note;” adding, “his lordship is universally esteemed as an accomplished nobleman and a brave officer.” Mrs. Scott happily goes on to treat of a plainer but much honester woman than Kitty Hunter: “The queen gives daily less satisfaction, and the people who at first found her out to be pleasing, seem now to be insensible to the discovery they then made. Her husband, however, seems fond of her.... Report says the Prince of Mecklenburg, a very pretty sort of man, with an agreeable person, is fallen desperately in love with Miss Bowes—a prudent passion; and the girl has no ambition if she does not choose to be a princess. I fancy, should she become such, he would be richer than the duke, his elder brother.... Lady Raymond is going to be married to Lord Robert Bertie,—an union wherein no acid will enter; for they are both famed for good temper. Mr. Whitehead’s play has been acted and published, and a poor performance it is. The dialogue flat and ungenteel, and the plot poor enough.”