The old Northumberland House festivals were right royal things in their way. There was, on the other hand, many a snug, or unceremonious, or eccentric party given there. Perhaps the most splendid was that given in honour of the King of Denmark in 1768. His majesty was fairly bewildered with the splendour. There was in the court what was called ‘a pantheon,’ illuminated by 4,000 lamps. The King, as he sat down to supper, at the table to which he had expressly invited twenty guests out of the hundreds assembled, said to the duke, ‘How did you contrive to light it all in time?’ ‘I had two hundred lamplighters,’ replied the duke. ‘That was a stretch,’ wrote candid Mrs. Delany; ‘a dozen could have done the business;’ which was true. The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one of the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the whole three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came ‘an exposition to sleep,’ as Bottom has it. At ‘drawing-rooms’ she no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while she was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and censured the next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a window in Covent Garden, and be _hail fellow well met_ with every one of a mob of tipsy and not too cleanly-spoken electors. On these occasions it was said she ‘signalised herself with intrepidity.’ She could bend, too, with cleverness to the humours of more hostile mobs; and when the Wilkes rioters besieged the ducal mansion, she and the duke appeared at a window, did salutation to their masters, and performed homage to the demagogue by drinking his health in ale. Horace Walpole affected to ridicule the ability of the duchess as a verse writer. At Lady Miller’s at Batheaston some rhyming words were given out to the company, and anyone who could, was required to add lines to them so as to make sense with the rhymes furnished for the end of each line. This sort of dancing in fetters was called _bouts rimés_. ‘On my faith,’ cried Walpole, in 1775, ‘there are _bouts rimés_ on a buttered muffin by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland.’ It may be questioned whether anybody could have surmounted the difficulty more cleverly than her Grace. For example: The pen which I now take and brandish, Has long lain useless in my standish. Know, every maid, from her own patten To her who shines in glossy satin, That could they now prepare an oglio From best receipt of book in folio, Ever so fine, for all their puffing, I should prefer a butter’d muffin; A muffin, Jove himself might feast on, If eaten with Miller, at Batheaston.