them; intimating, however, that this precaution was not intended to let the 'sublime discovery' fall into neglect, but only to confine the experiments to the direction of intelligent persons." In England, the fancy for them increased, and was the subject of various caricatures and pamphlets, until the death of a couple of Frenchmen, thrown to the earth from an immense height, cooled the soaring courage of the aëronauts. A more destructive and permanent folly was the passion for gambling, which, in spite of the attacks of the press, of grave censure and cutting satire, pervaded all ranks of society. There was a perfect fury for faro; and ladies of high fashion, and of aristocratic name, thought it not beneath them to convert their houses into hells. Three of these sporting dames, who had made themselves a name as keepers of banks, to which they enticed young men of fortune, were popularly known as "Faro's daughters." Lord Kenyon, when deciding on a gambling case, pledged himself, in a moment of virtuous indignation, to sentence _the first ladies in the land_ to the pillory, should they be brought before him for a similar offence. Not long afterwards, several titled gamblers were actually arraigned at his tribunal, but he forgot his threat, and let them off with a fine. The hint, however, was enough for Gillray, then in his glory, and for his brothers of the comic brush, and the moral exposure and castigation which 'Faro's daughters' endured at the hands of the caricaturists, can have been hardly less stinging and annoying than actual exposure to the hooting and pelting of the mob. General demoralisation, the natural consequence of gambling, characterised this period. Men and women, ruined at the board of green cloth, recruited their finances as best they might; and when no other resource remained, the latter bartered their reputation, and the former took to the road. Those were the palmy days of highway robbery. "We are in a state of war at home that is shocking," writes Horace Walpole in 1782. "I mean from the enormous profusion of housebreakers, highwaymen, and footpads; and, what is worse, from the savage barbarities of the two latter, who commit the most wanton cruelties. The grievance is so crying, that one dares not stir out after dinner but well armed. If one goes abroad to dinner, you would think he was going to the relief of Gibraltar." Sixty-two years ago, in January 1786, "the mail was stopped in Pall Mall, close to the palace, and deliberately pillaged, at so early an hour as a quarter past eight in the evening."