This was perhaps the gayest time in its history. From the precision and decorum of St. James's, people flocked eagerly to the drawing-rooms and receptions of Leicester House, where the fiddles were always going. 'Balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull formal visiting,' writes my Lord Chesterfield, 'and the women are more agreeable triflers than they were designed. Puns are extremely in vogue, and the license very great. The variation of three or four letters in a word breaks no squares, inasmuch, that an indifferent punster may make a very good figure in the best companies.' He himself was one of the most brilliant luminaries of that brilliant gathering, delighting the Prince and Princess by his mimicry and his caustic raillery. Another was that eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, who passed for the daughter of James II. by Catherine Sed-ley, Countess of Dorchester, and who always sat in a darkened chamber, in the deepest mourning, on the anniversary of King Charles's execution. Thus she was discovered by Lord Hervey, surrounded by servants in sables, in a room hung with black, and lighted only by wax candles. But the most attractive figures of the prince's Court are the youthful maids of honour,--charming, good-humoured Mary Bellenden, Mary Lepel (to whom a later paper of these 'Vignettes' has been devoted), * and reckless and volatile Sophia Howe. Pope and Gay wrote them verses,--these laughing ladies,--and they are often under contemporary pens. * See 'Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey,' in 'Eighteenth Century Vignettes,' 1806, pp. 293-323. Miss Bellenden married Colonel John Campbell, and became a happy wife; the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' paired off with John, Lord Hervey, whose pen-portrait by Pope exhausts the arts of 'conscientious malevolence,' while poor Sophia Howe fell in love, but did not marry at all, and died in 1726 of a broken heart.