Was Lady Judith Topsparkle happy, with all her blessings? She was gay; and with the polite world gaiety ranks as happiness, and commands the envy of the crowd. Nobody envies the quiet matron whose domestic life flows onward with the placidity of a sluggish stream. It is the butterfly queen of the hour whom people admire and envy. Lady Judith, blazing in diamonds at a Court ball, beautiful, daring, insolent, had half the town for her slaves and courtiers. Even women flattered and fawned upon her, delighted to be acknowledged as her acquaintance, proud to be invited to her parties, or to dance attendance upon her in public assemblies. She had been married three years, and her behaviour as a wife had been exemplary. Scandal had never breathed upon her name. The lampooners and caricaturists, a very coarse-minded crew under George I., had not yet bespattered her with their filth. They could only exaggerate her frivolities, caricature the cut of a train, the magnitude of a hoop, or the shape of her last new hat with its towering ostrich feathers, which obscured the view of the stage from the people who sat behind her in the side-boxes. They wrote about her appearances in the Park or at the Opera, about her parties and her high play, her love of horse-racing, and of the royal admirers of her charms; they wrote about her "Day," and the belles and beaux who thronged to her drawing-rooms to ogle and chatter scandal or politics, with the ever-increasing laxity of manners which had set in after the death of good Queen Anne; but not the boldest pamphleteer in Grub Street had dared to assail her virtue. "Wait till Lavendale comes back from the East," said Tom Philter, the party hack and newspaper scribbler, who pretended to have inherited the dignified humour of Addison and the easy graces of Prior, "and then you fellows will have plenty to write about 'Lady J----, the beautiful wife of a well-known City Croesus, himself once notorious for--' We know the style. And you, Jemmy," to the caricaturist, "can draw such cartoons as thy soul loveth, 'How the lady and her lover were surprised by old Moneybags in the little back parlour of an India House in the City.' It will be a glorious time for you scandal-mongers when his lordship reappears; and I heard t'other day he had been seen at Vienna on his homeward route." "Lady Judith is much too wise to have anything to say to such a scapegrace," said Jem Ludderly, the accomplished manufacturer of fashionable lampoons, who lived in May's Buildings, St. Martin's Lane, and saw the great world from the railings of the Park or the pit of the patent theatres. "Love is never wise," sighed Philter.