To return to the mob-hatred of the French. After the Westminster election, this feeling was kept up by squib and caricature; and in November 1755, Garrick having occasion to employ some French dancers, in a grand spectacle brought out at Drury Lane under the title of _The Chinese Festival_, a theatre row was the result. It was kept up for five nights; and on the sixth the mob smashed the lamps, demolished the scenery, and did several thousand pounds' worth of damage. This popular antipathy to the French did not, however, extend to the produce of France, or prevent the higher classes from patronising and importing French luxuries of all kinds, as well as a host of milliners, governesses, quacks, valets, and professors of other menial and decorative arts. The Gallomania of the fashionable world offered a fine field to the caricaturists, who made the most of it, to the great delight of the populace. French fashions, cookery, education, and nicknacks, were alternately taken as targets for the shafts of ridicule. Mr Wright transfers to his pages a ludicrous fragment of a print by Boitard, entitled "The Imports of Great Britain from France," in which an Englishwoman of quality is seen embracing and caressing a French female dancer, and assuring her that her arrival is to the honour and delight of England. And the mob of that day went so far as to believe that it was the love of the aristocracy for French perfumes and delicacies, cooks and coiffeurs, which prevented English ministers from properly protecting the national honour, and avenging the insults put upon us by our neighbours. The real evil, far more important than the consumption of French finery and cosmetics, was the importation of French corruption and immorality, so prevalent in England during the whole reign of George II., and during a portion of that of his successor. By this time the masquerades and _ridottos_, which had kept their ground in spite of the moralists, had grown so flagrant in their excesses and indecencies that, about the end of 1755, they were nearly suppressed; the earthquake at Lisbon having come to the aid of the anti-maskers, who took advantage of the panic it caused in London, to represent it as a judgment on the profligacy of the age. Previously to that, masquerades--not only those at public establishments, such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh, but at the private houses of persons of rank and fashion--offered glaring examples of indecorum--to use the very mildest word--until at last Miss Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, and afterwards Duchess of Kingston, showed herself at the Venetian ambassador's in a close-fitting dress of flesh-coloured silk. We may judge of the court morals of the time from the circumstance, that her royal mistress's sole rebuke was by throwing her own veil over the immodest beauty. The host of caricatures to which this gave rise, and the grossness of many of them, in that day of great pictorial license, are easily imagined.