The meetings of the lovers became known to the lady’s proud sire, and terrible was the scene which ensued between the “père noble” and the “ingénue.” The latter however promised to break off all intercourse, provided she were permitted to take one last farewell. She waited a day or two, till she was of age; and then, “instead of being under lock and key in the country, walked downstairs, took her footman, said she was going to breakfast with Lady Sarah, but would call at Miss Read’s; in the street, pretended to recollect a particular cap in which she was to be drawn; sent the footman back for it, whipped into a hackney chair, was married at Covent Garden Church, and set out for Mr. O’Brien’s villa at Dunstable.” This marriage was, as I have said, thought worse of than if the bridegroom had been a lacquey. The latter appear to have been in singular esteem, dead or living. Thus we read that the Duchess of Douglas, in 1765, having lost a favourite footman rather suddenly in Paris, she had him embalmed, and went to England, with the body of “Jeames” tied on in front of her chaise. “A droll way of being chief mourner,” says Walpole, who adds some droll things upon the English whom he encountered in journeying through France. When half a mile from Amiens, he met a coach and four with an equipage of French, and a lady in pea-green and silver, a smart hat and feather, and two _suivantes_. “My reason told me,” says the lively Horace, “it was the Archbishop’s concubine; but luckily my heart whispered that it was Lady Mary Coke. I jumped out of my chaise, fell on my knees, and said my first Ave Maria, gratiâ plena!” The esteem of the ladies for their liveried servitors does not appear to have been in all cases reciprocal, if we may believe a circumstance which took place at Leicester House, the residence of the Prince of Wales, in 1743, when one of his Royal Highness’s coachmen, who used to drive the maids of honour, was so sick of them, that he left his son three hundred pounds upon condition that he never _married_ a maid of honour! There was laxity both of manners and dress as time went on; and as we were an ill-dressed, so were we an ill-washed people. In the latter half of the last century we were distinguished as the only people in Europe who sat down to dinner without “dressing” or washing of hands. Indeed we were for a long time “not at all particular.”