“On this occasion one saw to how high-water-mark extravagance is risen in England. At the Coronation of George II. my mother gave forty guineas for a dining-room, scaffold, and bedchamber. An exactly parallel apartment, only with rather a worse view, was this time set at three hundred and fifty guineas--a tolerable rise in thirty-three years! The platform from St. Margaret’s Round-house to the church-door, which formerly let for forty pounds, went this time for two thousand four hundred pounds. Still more was given for the inside of the Abbey. The prebends would like a Coronation every year. The King paid nine thousand pounds for the hire of jewels; indeed, last time, it cost my father fourteen hundred to bejewel my Lady Orford. A single shop now sold six hundred pounds’ sterling worth of nails--but nails are risen--so is everything, and everything adulterated. If we conquer Spain, as we have done France, I expect to be poisoned.” An observation as awkward as that of Lord Effingham had been made by the beautiful Lady Coventry to George II. “She was tired of sights,” she said; “there was only one left that she wanted to see, and that was a coronation.” The old man, says Walpole, told the story himself at supper to his family with great good humour. As it happened, he outlived Lady Coventry by a few days. CHAPTER IV. General Taste for Pleasure.--Entertainments at Twickenham and Esher.--Miss Chudleigh’s Ball.--Masquerade at Richmond House.--The Gallery at Strawberry Hill.--Balls.--The Duchess of Queensberry.--Petition of the Periwig-makers.--Ladies’ Head-gear.--Almack’s.--The Castle of Otranto.--Plans for a Bower.--A Late Dinner.--Walpole’s Idle Life.--Social usages.