Translated to a new world of splendour the Irish girl seems to have borne herself with astonishing dignity and modesty. She might, indeed, have been cradled in a Duke's palace, instead of in a "dilapidated farmhouse in the wilds of Ireland," so naturally did she take to her new _rôle_. When Her Grace, wearing her Duchess's coronet, made her curtsy to the King one March day in 1752, "the crowd was so great, that even the noble mob in the drawing-room clambered upon tables and chairs to look at her. There are mobs at the doors to see her get into her chair; and people go early to get places at the theatre when it is known that she will be there." A few weeks after the marriage, the Duke of Hamilton conducted his bride to the home of his ancestors; and never perhaps has any but a Royal bride made such a splendid progress to her future home. Along the entire route from London to Scotland she was greeted with cheering crowds struggling to catch a glimpse of the famous beauty, whose romantic story had stirred even the least sentimental to sympathy and curiosity. When they stopped one night at a Yorkshire inn, "seven hundred people," we are told, "sat up all night in and about the house merely to see the Duchess get into her post-chaise the next morning." Arrived at her husband's Highland Castle she was received with honours that might almost have embarrassed a Queen, and which must have seemed strange indeed to the woman whose memories of sordid life in that small cottage on the outskirts of Dublin were still so vivid. Indeed no Queen could have led a more stately life than was now opened to her. "The Duke of Hamilton," says Walpole, to whom the world is indebted for so much that it knows of the Gunning sisters, "is the abstract of Scotch pride. He and the Duchess, at their own house, walk into dinner before their company, sit together at the upper end of their own table, eat off the same plate, and drink to nobody under the rank of an Earl. Would not indeed," the genial old chatterbox adds, "one wonder how they could get anybody, either above or below that rank, to dine with them at all? It is, indeed, a marvel how such a host could find guests of any degree sufficiently wanting in self-respect to sit at his table and endure his pompous insolence--the insolence of an innately vulgar mind, which, unhappily, is sometimes to be met even in the most exalted rank of life."