On this particular night at Vauxhall--the opening masquerade of the season--the fashionable world, as well as those who, though not in that world themselves, loved to gaze on the happier beings who were of it, assembled in large numbers and in a variety of costumes. Scaramouches in their black dresses, toques and masks, with rush lances in their hands, mingled with dancing girls clad in the Turkish costumes still known in these days as "Roxanas," in memory of the infamous woman who had first worn this garb; shepherdesses walked arm-in-arm with men dressed as grave and reverend clergymen; assumed victims of the Inquisition, invested in the San Benito, pirouetted and twirled with brazen-faced and under-clad Iphigenias and Phrynes--for the world was none too modest in those days!--mock soldiers, knights and satyrs, harlequins, and men in wizard's garments danced and drank, laughed and shouted with milkmaids, nuns, and Joans of Arc. And to testify, perhaps, the fact that they had not forgotten the dangers through which the country had recently passed, and also, perhaps, to hurl one last taunt at their crushed and broken foes, many of the maskers had arrayed themselves in the garbs of their late enemies--for some strutted round and round the orchestra pavilion and banqueting room dressed as Highlanders or French officers, others as miserable Scotch peasants having in their hands flails and reaping hooks. Others, again, had even attempted to portray the character of the unhappy Charles Edward, now in hiding in the Scotch wilds, and, as they danced and sang or drank their glasses of ale and ate their twopenny slices of hung-beef, and endeavoured even by their conversation to ape what they imagined to be the Scotch dialect. At the same time, outside all this seething, painted, and bedizened crowd were many others of the better classes, such as those who formed Lady Belrose's party, or visitors of a similar degree, who contented themselves by concealing their identity with masks, vizards, and dominos, or with hoods and laces.