Perusing records that are a century old is something better than listening to a centenarian, even if his memory could go back so far. The records are as fresh as first impressions, and they bring before us men and things as they were, not as after-historians supposed them to be. The story which 1773 has left of itself is full of variety and of interest. Fashion fluttered the propriety of Scotland when the old Dowager Countess of Fife gave the first masquerade that ever took place in that country, at Duff House. In England, people and papers could talk or write of nothing so frequently as masquerades. ‘One hears so much of them,’ remarked that lively old lady, Mrs. Delany, ‘that I suppose the only method not to be tired of them is to frequent them.’ Old-fashioned loyalty in England was still more shocked when the Lord Mayor of London declined to go to St. Paul’s on the 30th of January to profess himself sad and sorry at the martyrdom of Charles I. In the minds of certain religious people there was satisfaction felt at the course taken by the University of Oxford, which refused to modify the Thirty-nine Articles, as more liberal Cambridge had done. Indeed, such Liberalism as that of the latter, prepared ultra-serious people for awful consequences; and when they heard that Moelfammo, an extinct volcano in Flintshire, had resumed business, and was beginning to pelt the air with red-hot stones, they naturally thought that the end of a wicked world was at hand. They took courage again when the Commons refused to dispense with subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, by a vote of 150 to 64. But no sooner was joy descending on the one hand than terror advanced on the other. Quid-nuncs asked whither the world was driving, when the London livery proclaimed the reasonableness of annual parliaments. Common-sense people also were perplexed at the famous parliamentary resolution that Lord Clive had wrongfully taken to himself above a quarter of a million of money, and had rendered signal services to his country!