When there were members in the Commons who rouged like pert girls or old women, and carried nosegays as huge as a lady mayoress’s at a City ball, we are not surprised to hear of macaronies in Kensington Gardens. There they ran races on every Sunday evening, ‘to the high amusement and contempt of the mob,’ says Walpole. The mob had to look at the runners from outside the gardens. ‘They will be ambitious of being fashionable, and will run races too.’ Neither mob nor macaronies had the swiftness of foot or the lasting powers of some of the running footmen attached to noble houses. Dukes would run matches of their footmen from London to York, and a fellow has been known to die rather than that ‘his grace’ who owned him should lose the match. Talking of ‘graces,’ an incident is told by Walpole of the cost of a bed for a night’s sleep for a duchess, which may well excite a little wonder now. The king and court were at Portsmouth to review the fleet. The town held so many more visitors than it could accommodate that the richest of course secured the accommodation. ‘The Duchess of Northumberland gives forty guineas for a bed, and must take her chambermaid into it.’ Walpole, who is writing to the Countess of Ossory, adds: ‘I did not think she would pay so dear for _such_ company.’ The people who were unable to pay ran recklessly into debt, and no more thought of the sufferings of those to whom they owed the money than that modern rascalry in clean linen, who compound with their creditors and scarcely think of paying their ‘composition.’ A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the virtues of Charles James Fox, who had none but such as may be found in easy temper and self-indulgence. He was now in debt to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. But so once was Julius Cæsar, with whom Walpole satirically compared him. He let his securities, his bondsmen, pay the money which they had warranted would be forthcoming from him, ‘while he, as like Brutus as Cæsar, is indifferent about such paltry counters.’ When one sees the vulgar people who by some means or other, and generally by any means, accumulate fortunes the sum total of which would once have seemed fabulous, and when we see fortunes of old aristocratic families squandered away among the villains of the most villainous ‘turf,’ there is nothing strange in what we read in a letter of a hundred years ago, namely: ‘What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth! filled by nabobs and emptied by macaronies; a country over-run by horse-races.’ So London at the end of July now is not unlike to London of 1773; but we could not match the latter with such a street picture as the following: ‘There is scarce a soul in London but macaronies lolling out of windows at Almack’s, like carpets to be dusted.’ With the more modern parts of material London Walpole was ill satisfied. _We_ look upon Adam’s work with some complacency, but Walpole exclaims, ‘What are the Adelphi buildings?’ and he