Early in the eighteenth century, polite society added to its other accomplishments that of the wildest gambling, to which the South-Sea Bubble gave the impulse. At White's, young gentlemen frequently lost in one evening from £5 to £20,000; and at the Cocoa Tree, one night, there was a single stake of £180,000. The unbounded betting mania among the bucks was often displayed in the quaintest forms. Thus, for instance, in 1756, Lords Rockingham and Oxford got up a race between four geese and four turkeys from Norwich to London. English "eccentricity," as the French would call it, had the fullest scope at that time. Take, for instance, Lord Baltimore, whom we find travelling on the Continent, in 1769, with a harem of eight women, on whom he tried all sorts of dietetic experiments. I need only hint at the orgies held in Medmenham Abbey, and the blasphemous travesties of the Hell-fire Club, to which fifteen ladies of the highest rank considered it an honour to belong. At that time, the governing classes and the governed had scarce anything in common but the air they breathed, or an occasional street row. Fashionable vice affected a publicity which imparts historic value to the satirical descriptions which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has left us. She tells us, _inter alia_, how, at Sir R. Walpole's seat, a bill was discussed, for the purpose of omitting the "not" from the Ten Commandments. Further on, we find a remark that both sexes have so thoroughly recognised the inconveniences of matrimony that even girls ridiculed it; and the title of "rake" graces women no less than men. Or again, we read that, now-a-days, it is not considered at all improper to say publicly that the Maid of Honour, Mrs. So-and-So, had got over her confinement, but that Miss Whatshername has never thoroughly recovered from her accouchement. With such a tone prevailing in society, we can understand how Lord Chesterfield could reply to the notorious Miss Chudleigh, when she complained of having been falsely accused of giving birth to twins, "For my part, I never believe more than half of what people say."