The great attraction of the Cremorne season of 1863 was a tournament, got up on the model of the one which attracted so large a proportion of the upper ten thousand to Eglinton Castle in the summer of 1844. There was a grand procession to the lists, and an imposing display of banners, and all the pomp and pageantry of bygone times; and then the encounters of the armoured knights, for which the lists at Cremorne afforded much more scope than the stage at Astley’s, or even at Drury Lane. Doubtless there were some dummies, as I have seen in the tournament scene in _Mazeppa_; but the living knights acquitted themselves very creditably, and the spectacle proved a powerful source of attraction. The Queen of Beauty was a lady whose ordinary business was to ride in _entrées_, and who was known professionally as Madame Caroline. If she did not, like Thackeray’s Miss Montmorency, live in the New Cut, she had her abode in the vicinage of that thoroughfare, in the somewhat more westerly region which receives, after midnight, so large a proportion of those who, in various ways, contribute to the amusement of the public. Yet there may have been some of the critical spectators of the Cremorne tournament who, looking upon Madame Caroline, may have felt the force of the remark made by Willis as to the comparative suitability of Lady Seymour and Fanny Kemble to have occupied the throne of the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton Castle. ‘The eyes,’ said Willis, ‘to flash over a crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance, to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public award of honour, should be full of command; dark, lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene heaven of a happy hearth—eyes to love, not wonder at—to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for. At the distance at which most of the spectators of the tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble’s stormy orbs would have shown much finer; and the forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head and figure would have been more applauded than the quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace, lost to all but those immediately around her.’