As he went to the rendezvous his chaise was stopped, and he was advised by someone not to proceed. But proceed he did, and in the garden he found Mrs. Mackenzy. She asked him whether he was going to pay, and, on his declining to do so, the fair virago took a horsewhip from beneath her hoop, and fell upon him with the utmost vehemence.’ Members of clubs were fully aware of the nefariousness of their devotion to gambling. When a waiter at Arthur’s Club was taken up for robbery, George Selwyn said: ’What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate?’ Certes, some of the highwaymen in that prison were not such robbers and scoundrels as some of the aristocratic members of those clubs. When, in 1750, the people got frightened about an earthquake in London, predicted to happen in that year, ’Lady Catherine Pelham,’ Walpole tells us, ’Lady James Arundell, and Lord and Lady Galway ... go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are going to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back, I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish.’ When the rulers of the nation on such an occasion, or any other occasion of public terror, possibly caused by their own mismanagement of public affairs, hypocritically and most impertinently ordered a day of fasting and humiliation, the gambling-houses used to be filled with officials and members of Parliament, who thus had a day off. There was one famous gambling-house we find we have not yet mentioned, viz., Shaver’s Hall, which occupied the whole of the southern side of Coventry Street, from the Haymarket to Hedge Lane (now Oxenden Street), and derived its name from the barber of Lord Pembroke, who built it out of his earnings. Attached to it was a bowling-green, which sloped down to the south. The place was built about the year 1650, and the tennis-court belonging to it till recently might still be seen in St. James’s Street. *II.* *WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN.*