In a few days the bubble burst. The lady turned out to be no rich widow, but a Mrs. Wadsworth, who was given to frolicking, and who thought this the merriest frolic of her light-o’-love life. Fielding, who had passed himself off as a count, had not much to say in his own behalf, and he turned the ‘sun of his life’ out of doors. Whither he could turn he knew right well. He had long served all the purposes of the Duchess of Cleveland, the degraded old mistress of Charles II.; and within three weeks of his being buckled to Mrs. Wadsworth by the Leicester Square priest he married Duchess Barbara. Soon after he thrashed Mrs. Wadsworth in the street for claiming him as her lawful husband, and he beat the Duchess at home for asserting that Mrs. Wadsworth was right. Old Barbara did more. She put two hundred pounds into that lady’s hand, to prosecute Fielding for bigamy, and the Duchess promised her a hundred pounds a year for fifteen years if she succeeded in getting him convicted. And the handsome Hercules was convicted accordingly, at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to be burnt in the hand; but the rascal produced Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. And so ended the Leicester Square wedding. As long as the Emperor’s envoy lived in Leicester Fields he was the leader of fashion. Crowds assembled to see his ‘turn out.’ Sir Francis Gripe, in the ‘Busy-body,’ tempts Miranda by saying, ‘Thou shalt be the envy of the Ring, for I will carry thee to Hyde Park, and thy equipage shall surpass the what-d’ye-call-’em ambassador’s.’ Leicester House was, luckily, to let when the Prince of Wales quarrelled with his father, George I. In that house the Prince set up a rival court, against attending which the ‘London Gazette’ thundered dreadful prohibitions. But St. James’s was dull; Leicester House was ‘jolly’; and the fields were ‘all alive’ with spectators ‘hooraying’ the arrivals. Within, the stately Princess towered among her graceful maids. With regard to her diminutive husband it was said of his visitors, In his embroidered coat they found him, With all his strutting dwarfs around him. Most celebrated among the Leicester House maids of honour was the young, bright, silvery-laughing, witty, well-bred girl, who could not only spell, but could construe Cæsar--the maid of whom Chesterfield wrote-- Should the Pope himself go roaming, He would follow dear Molly Lepell.