replies, ‘Warehouses laced down the seams, like a soldier’s trull in a regimental old coat!’ Mason could not bear the building brothers. ‘Was there ever such a brace,’ he asks, ‘of self-puffing Scotch coxcombs?’ The coxcombical vein was, nevertheless, rather the fashionable one. Fancy a nobleman’s postillions in white jackets trimmed with muslin, and clean ones every other day! In such guise were Lord Egmont’s postillions to be seen. The chronicle of fashion is dazzling with the record of the doings of the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. At her house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, were held the assemblies which were scornfully called ‘blue-stocking’ by those who were not invited, or who affected not to care for them if they _were_. Mrs. Delany, who certainly had a great regard for this ‘lady of the last century,’ has a sly hit at Mrs. Montagu in a letter of May 1773. ‘If,’ she writes, ‘I had paper and time, I could entertain you with Mrs. Montagu’s room of Cupidons, which was opened with an assembly for all the foreigners, the literati, and the macaronies of the present age. Many and sly are the observations how such a _genius_, at her age and so circumstanced, could think of painting the walls of her dressing-room with bowers of roses and jessamine, entirely inhabited by little Cupids in all their little wanton ways. It is astonishing, unless she looks upon herself as the wife of old Vulcan, and mother to all those little Loves!’ This is a sister woman’s testimony of a friend! The _genius_ of Mrs. Montagu was of a higher class than that of dull but good Mrs. Delany. The _age_ of the same lady was a little over fifty, when she might fittingly queen it, as she did, in her splendid mansion in Hill Street, the scene of the glories of her best days. The ‘circumstances’ and the ‘Vulcan’ were allusions to her being the wife of a noble owner of collieries and a celebrated mathematician, who suffered from continued ill-health, and who considerately went to bed at _five_ o’clock P.M. daily!