"Lord G. is now pretty well acquainted with the ways there; his personal charges, he is sure, will be small in comparison; he will not be in expensive companies or houses, but when business requires it; nor at any diversion but what he finds necessary for keeping up the cheerfulness of his own spirit, and the health of his body. He wears plain and not fine clothes. When there last he kept not a servant, but had a fellow at call, to whom he gave a shilling a-day such days as he was to be at court or among the great, and must have a footman as necessarily as a coat on his back or a sword by his side. He never was nice and expensive in his own eating, and less now than ever; for this winter he has quite lost the relish of French claret, the most expensive article in London. He is to travel without a servant, for whom he knows not any sort of use on the road, and only has a post-boy, whom he must have, had he twenty servants of his own; and so he travelled last year."[33] Strange indeed were the social extremes between which this journey lay. At the one end we see the brilliant assemblages of the most brilliant age of English fashion. The rays of the wax-lights glitter back from stars and sword-hilts, diamond buttons and spangles. Velvet coats, huge laced waistcoats, abundant hoops, spread forth their luxurious wealth--the air is rich and thick with perfumed powder--the highest in rank, and wealth, and influence are there, so are the first in genius and learning. Reverse the picture, and take the northern end of the journey. In an old dark stone house, at the end of a dismal alley, Lovat's ragged banditti throttle a shrieking woman--a guilty cavalcade passes hurriedly at night across the dark heath--next opens a dreary dungeon in a deserted feudal fortalice--a boat tosses on the bosom of the restless Atlantic--and the victim is consigned to the dreary rock, where year follows year, bringing no change with it but increasing age. The contrast is startling. Yet, when we read Lady Grange's diary and Lady Mary Wortley's letters together, they leave one doubtful whether most to shudder at the savage lawlessness of one end of the island, or the artificial vices that were growing out of a putrid civilisation in the other. THE ROYAL PROGRESS.