After this there were very few masquerades during ten or twelve years, at the end of which time the court again set the fashion of them, soon after George the Third's accession. Towards 1770, Mrs Cornelys got up her "Harmonic Meetings," at Carlisle House in Soho Square. These subscription balls and masquerades were attended by most of the nobility and leaders of the _ton_; and, at one of them, we learn the presence of "two royal dukes, and nearly all the fashionable portion of the aristocracy. On this occasion, Colonel Luttrell (the same who had opposed Wilkes in the election for Middlesex) appeared as a dead corpse in a shroud, in his coffin." Much used, from the very first, for purposes of intrigue, these assemblies soon became unbearably licentious. The company fell off, both in numbers and respectability, until the only way to fill the rooms was by the admission of bad characters. This made them sink lower and lower, until "we read in the _St James's Chronicle_ of April 23, 1795, the remark that 'No amusement seems to have fallen into greater contempt, in this country, than the masquerades.... They have been lately mere assemblages of the idle and profligate of both sexes, who made up in indecency what they wanted in wit.'" A description that has ever since been applicable to London masquerades, which still continue, we apprehend, to be mere pretexts for debauchery; whilst even in Paris, whose atmosphere, and the character of whose inhabitants, have generally been found more favourable to that class of amusements, the famed opera balls have sunk, within the last twenty years, into the saturnalia of idle students, profligate apprentices, and ladies of uncertain virtue.